And he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel

I am her momma, so when she told me, all excited and flushed that she had found a snake in the garden, I lifted my eyebrows and practised my delighted with joy face. I went and had a look, and lo, and behold, there he was. Sitting on one of the fat big flower leaves all shiny with his sides panting in and out in this steam room heat. I did a very good job of not screaming, or jumping, or of letting the sound waboloahmobagadageta! out of my mouth. "Wow. Look at that," I said instead. "A snake where I had been planning on kneeling and digging in the dirt with my bare hands. Really. Wow." I think she bought it. We've been on the look out ever since, but for different reasons.

So, I don't have a lot of experiences with snakes. Actually, I only have "experience" with a snake. Singular. My uncle caught a garter once in a grassy field outside his house and showed it to all us kids playing in the backyard. It peed something yellow on his hand. Maybe pee. And then he let it go. And that was that. But, apparently, or so it seems, in Iowa, in my backyard even, snakes abound. My sister found a snake head in the campground shower that they were staying in. Just the head. And she made a face to show me what it's mouth looked like. Not pleasant. But worse than that was the bizarre and upsetting experience of the Amana Colonies. We all drove out there for a day of hand carved clocks, weaving looms, German sized schnitzel and all around old tyme fun, but instead we met a snake. A big shiny stripy thing that slithered sideways across the dirt road and shook its tail at us like it thought it was making a rattle. And it was amazing. And beautiful. And I gave it plenty of room to get where it was going without worrying about me. We all did. My whole family stopped to have a little look. And then we noticed a car, which was being driven slowly toward us gathered on the road, and we all "Oh, no'ed" and willed the snake to hurry itself along. My dad stood up straight and pointed toward the road so that the driver, an older woman with a white puff of grandma hair, could avoid it. She saw my dad. Saw the snake. And turned the wheels of her very slow moving car. But she turned them right toward the snake. She drove over it slowly and deliberately with all of us and all the kids watching in slo-mo horror, until the last second when we turned away to avoid seeing the inevitable pop that we would hear. When I looked back, the snake had contracted into a tightly coiled rug of itself. It spasmed and jerked and India celebrated that, "It's alive! Look momma, it's still moving!" I think someone swore. I think my dad shook his hands at the car and started to walk after it.
Later, I asked an elderly lady if there were any poisonous snakes in the area, thinking that the woman had maybe driven over it for our safety, but she said that there weren't and that in fact, she hadn't seen a snake there in ages, not since she was a girl.

One of my friends, a good friend that I've known for years, told me that he found a snake once in some rocks by a lake. A harmless little snake, he knew, but he had killed it when he found it. The meanness of it bothered him, and when I asked him why he had done it, he said that he thought that it was because he was afraid of it. And it surprised him, I could tell; he hadn't known that violence was sitting in him.

I read once in a book on child development that around the age of two or three toddlers begin to develop a natural fear of slithery things like snakes and bugs and spiders - a built in safety mechanism to give the kid a fighting chance in a world where bears or cougars or, I don't know, the flu might do them in. So it could be argued, I suppose, that the creepy feeling I get when I see a snake in my own yard is a natural thing. I've a right to be afraid. Maybe it's even natural to want to kill it, though I think we all know that's not going to happen with me. I just wonder though, about this tendency toward violence when we are afraid, about the different manifestations of violence we morph our reactions into, about my own hidden versions of violence. And fear, of course, about all sorts of things - like failure or insufficiency or shame or sex or embarrassment or loneliness or death or powerlessness. One day I might write a book. It might be called something like, "The Way I was Afraid," because I'm not great at titles. I would probably also like to put a snake on the cover.