My mother was deathly afraid of snakes. I mean petrified. She would not watch anything on TV that was snake related. She refused to go into the reptile house at the zoo even thought they were all contained safely behind glass. I guess she just had visions of the glass somehow breaking and the snakes getting loose.
Oh the peril that would have held … but not for my mom, for the snakes!
My dad was in Vietnam, so I must have been about eight or nine. We lived in a rented three bedroom house. My bedroom was right across the hall from my mom’s room, and the one my sisters shared was on the other end of the house.
One night I awoke to hear a blood-curdling scream and a loud banging noise. If this were to happen now, I’d think it was some sort of criminal attack – someone breaking in and attacking my mom or something. As a child, though, all it did was scare the daylights out of me.
I leapt out of bed, and there right outside my bedroom door – in the hall – was my mother, on her knees, furiously chopping away at something on the hardwood floor with a butcher knife, all the while screaming at the top of her lungs.
She had been coming down the hall to go to bed and saw a snake slithering along the floor. Actually, calling it a snake is a joke … it was all of, maybe, nine inches long. I’m really not to sure of the actual length, though, because when I saw it, it was diced, neatly, into ¼ inch pieces. She made one of my sisters clean up the mess, because she couldn’t bring herself to touch the thing.
She made me spend the rest of the night with my sisters at the other end of the house. She’d always heard that snakes traveled in pairs, so she was sure there was another one lurking. If so, it probably high-tailed it out of the house when it saw what happened to its cohort. My mom stayed in her own room, and slept – fitfully – with the knife at her side.
The next day a friend of the family came over and repaired the damage to the floor so the landlord wouldn’t find out. Luckily, he knew what he was doing.
So … had my mom actually ventured into a reptile house and the snakes had escaped, carnage would have ensued.
It might have been interesting.
