Last night about 9:30, The Husband came out to the porch in an uncharacteristic rush for that time of night. He grabbed a walking stick and a long-handled ice scraper from the corner. I said, "What in the world...?"
"There's a snake in Jamie's kitchen!"
Jamie is a cousin and our next-door neighbor, a single woman. She is scared of snakes. She'd called her uncle to come deal with the snake, but he was not home, so she'd texted The Husband for help. Armed with a flashlight and his long-handled weapons, he took out across the yard at a pretty good clip.
Twenty minutes later, I saw two flashlight beams headed in my direction. Son #2 was holding the second flashlight. "I called for reinforcement!" The Husband said. To hear him tell it, the snake was an escape artist. It had been on the kitchen counter when The Husband arrived, but as he tried to wrangle it, it zoomed up into the window blinds over the sink and wedged itself into the crevices around the window. He tried to dig it out with a kitchen spatula but was unsuccessful. That's when he called Son #2 from across the road.
Son #2 was carrying a hollow plastic tube about 4 feet long with a wire loop extending from one end. He'd hurriedly engineered a snake lasso. He was carrying a plastic shopping bag.
I asked, "Did you get it?" They had. It was in the shopping bag.
"Do you want to see it?" Son #2 asked.
"Is it still alive?"
"Yeah."
"NO! GET IT OUT OF HERE AND OFF IT!"
It was a scarlet king snake, a non-poisonous type. The menfolk decided not to kill it; they were going to take it down to the creek and turn it loose. As Son #2 was trying to let it out of the bag, it wrapped itself around the handle. He had to whack it on a rock to make it turn loose.
The Husband said that this is the SECOND snake found in Jamie's house in the past week. The cat found the first one under Jamie's bed. She'd seen another one in her garage.
You could not pay me to sit on her couch right now. ;)
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