MindSpinner

While I was at school finishing the very last yearbook spread, my children undertook a favor for me by planting my currants in the back yard. (I will have to redo this before they wake this morning - they hadn’t a clue and planted them without soil amendments about four inches below ground level. But they did remember to water.) An afternoon adventure found them in the form of a snake sunning itself on the sewer access, a concrete slab with a manhole cover near where they were planting. Catapult Kid slew it with a machete while Dark-Haired Daughter bonked it with a shovel until it was dead and deader than that. They threw its head out of the yard, across the fence and down by the railroad tracks, which is where I’ll have to go if I really want to find out what kind of snake it was. In fact, I do - I’m curious that way. They told me it was a cobra with a circle on its hood. Yeah, they’d tell me that. They haven’t watched Indiana Jones and Snakes on Plane for nothing. The remaining 4.5 feet of it I can’t identify - a solid brown back with whitish underbelly, no pronounced pattern. Maybe a rat snake?

After they’d shown me their conquest, Catapult Kid had a notion to burn it - heaven only knows why - some ritualistic sacrifice reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. And to that end, he brought it, draped over the end of the machete, up to the house and laid it on the deck. Next thing I knew he was preparing to fire up the sacrificial altar, our rusted Smoky Joe Grill, with the sacrificial fuel, MatchLight Charcoal.

Newly minted, nominal adults possessed of a bad idea and a sense of humor sometimes presume to overrule somewhat shrieky maternal vetoes along the lines of “You are not going to cook that damned snake on our grill!,” and so it came to pass that I picked up the snake on the end of the machete and tore out through the kitchen garden for the back fence, with Catapult Kid in pursuit and closing in fast. Remembering his considerable prowess in middle school football, I gauged my timing and swung the machete, slinging the snake in a graceful arc across the fence but, alas, not out of sight. It landed conspicuously in leaves at the base of a tree, white belly up.

“Oh,” he laughed. “That should be easy enough to find.” Suddenly an impromptu outing for dinner and a movie sounded like the best and most timely of ideas, and so we left the snake in the woods, the charcoal in the grill, and the currants only somewhat planted, hopped in the car, and managed to stay gone until well after dark. And now that it’s morning, I think I’ll just sneak out to the woods wearing a good pair of boots, find that snake, and bury it somewhere.