1.
The girls said there were snakes. Their coach said, “Those were earthworms!” The entire team objected. Days later, Trudy found a picture one of them had posted on Facebook, which were not even close to being earthworms.
Yes. They were snakes, albeit snakes covered in mud, but snakes without a doubt.
2.
We stood in the street saying goodbye. We had eaten Tex-Mex (the best stacked enchiladas I’d ever had). We had played a rousing game of Scrabble. (He beat the tar out of the two of us.)
I pointed to to a spot in the street that was glistening in the streetlight light.
“A snake skin,” he said.
“No, a snake,” I said. “It was trying to get to our yard.”
3.
The south side of the house is kind of a mess. Weeds and unmowed clumps of hard-to-reach grass and 4×4 posts I scrounged last year when the construction crew was disposing of our rickety, falling-down pergola.
Anyway, I walk by that mess many times each weekend going from the front yard to the back and from the back yard to the front. On the north side of the house, I have a rule of always stopping to pull a few weeds every time I pass. I don’t know why I haven’t followed the same rule on the south. So today I stopped and stooped and pulled a handful of greenery.
As I grabbed my last handful, there was a flickering movement, and I caught the tail end of something long and grey and wiggly slithering into a clump of leaves.
Yes. It was a snake. And this one had made it safely into our refugio.