Unwelcome Visitors

My time here at the edge of the woods on Old Dixie Lane has been full of chasing down squirrels in the house, removing at least a dozen frogs that squeezed inside and shooing away a hundred dirt daubers, lizards and beetles from the kitchen. Almost as if the walls between inside and out temporarily vanish to provide new hunting grounds that beckon scores of crawling, flying and slithering things, free access to sample the domestic life in my living room. Last Sunday brought a new and disturbingly more heart whomping visitor.

Repainting was underway in the spare bedroom and leaving painter Jim with his brushes and buckets of paint, with Farina dawg in the backseat I went off to the market for some groceries. Ordinarily on my return from shopping, groceries get carried in through the front door but since Jim had the entrance hall stacked with his supplies I headed with the bags of groceries to the back screen door. Farina was at my heels and five feet inside the porch she froze, suddenly erupting into snarls and growls, eyes focused on the floor below her long, screen-level perch, a couple of giant plastic bins weighted and piled with dog cushions. Eight feet away a 4-foot snake lay coiled on the floor, head raised in a threatening pose. Knowing the dawg’s tendencies, first thing I did was force her outside and shut the dog door.

Eyeing the evil serpent closely I eased the bags of groceries to the floor and inch by inch reached for a broom and the long-handled litter grabber I keep by the door. Not sure if my eyes were playing tricks on me, I could have sworn I saw venom dripping from the snake’s open mouth. I called Jim to drop his paintbrush and come out to the back porch pronto. He took the squeeze handle litter grabber and moved to one end of the porch while I circled the dawg perch to flush the snake from behind with the broom. Jim was moments away from wetting his painter pants but with maybe the longest lifetime stretch of his right arm somehow snagged the snake with the grabber. Before I could take the grabber from him the snake wiggled loose, snapping furiously at the air. Trying to avoid my lunges with the grabber, it slithered toward the door end of the porch with me snatching at it with the picker-upper and dodging strikes from what I hoped was a non-venomous head. I caught it; it got away. I lunged, it lunged back and then began squeezing itself into a wide crack between the floor and the wall paneling. On the verge of a heart attack I managed to work the hysterical serpent out of the floor crack. It began to snap at my arm furiously before I was able to get its head in a solid rubber grip. Painter Jim had finally just let go and peed his pants while Farina outside the screen door was leaping two feet into the air and barking 911. The head secure inside the rubber grips, I held the writhing snake with outstretched arm and took it across the road. By then I knew it was a harmless black snake, the kind we are encouraged to leave alone because they are “good” snakes. I flung the good snake into the woods opposite my house. Venomous or not, good notwithstanding, my heart was beating like I’d just witnessed a serial killing. Jim went off to dig a change of clothes out of his truck and Farina went off looking for another snake.

My guess is the snake wiggled into the house under the somewhat ineffective door sweep at the bottom of the back porch screen door.

Life Among Frogs & Bookmarks

My neighbor Manny was over late yesterday afternoon doing some touch up work on the grass outside the gate and during a pause over the idling lawnmower he pointed to the gap in his front teeth and said he found a guy that’s going to put a new tooth in next week or the week after, a guy—I didn’t hear the word dentist—that works out of the trunk of his Pontiac Le Grand and uses laughing gas as an anesthesia. Didn’t know what to say to that, my mind running with images of dentistry by way of a tire iron and Krazy Glue. 

Finding mouse droppings on the floor of the back porch recently, I set out a mousetrap, baiting it with a small piece of Boar’s Head herb chicken neatly wrapped around a dab of lo-cal peanut butter. Next morning the mouse trap was gone, disappeared, snatched up in a poof of nighttime magic. It occurred to me that the mouse might have been too big for the trap and undeterred by the snap of steel, but held by leg or tail dragged the trap and itself off to an emergency exit. I looked around the porch and soon spied the mousetrap upside down in a corner by the screen door. I flipped the trap over with a broom and couldn’t believe my eyes—a frog caught by the toes of one leg and still trying to hop away. I rescued the poor creature, figuring it must have brain damage after a night of that, and it quickly hopped out the open door, apparently uninjured.

Later, I stood for thirty minutes watching a lengthy black snake nosing around outside the back porch. I decided finally, judging by the way the snake pushed its nose into the leaf litter and small holes, that it was looking for a meal of insects or lizards. It paid me no mind as I stood back at least ten feet hoping not to alarm it. Best not to bother or kill these non-venomous snakes since they help keep rats, mice and bad snakes away. I haven’t seen any of the small rattlers around, even though the climate and geography are magnets for their breed. 

Days pass in my country jungle jumping with every kind of life save elephants and giraffe, a place that brings back to a transplanted city boy some of the small wisdoms that concrete, swimming pools and shopping malls forced us to either discard or forget. Live with them long enough and even the dullard will find a way to cope with mosquitos, diminish the ant bites, avoid the hairy caterpillars and manage the summer heat. I’m learning how to blend. 

I transplanted a big tub of mint to a spot just off the back porch three days ago. For a long time it was a beautiful, lush and bountiful plant happy and snug under the table situated on a beach patio. Starting out as a small $1.99 pot of mint from Publix, for some reason only science can explain, it went wild on that salty windblown spot just off the ocean. When I brought it here to the country it fell straight into a decline, turning scragglier by the week. Thinking it might be root bound I dug it out of the large tub and planted it beside a clump of purple lantana behind the camphor tree, then brought home another small pot of supermarket mint to plant as a bolster beside the ailing cousin. 

Squirrels are doing their best now to munch through the seed-packed magnolia fruit-cones that succeed the fall of the tree’s large white blooms. I try to dissuade the pesky varmints but they are tenacious devils. Put together in a bowl the fruit-cones have a certain beauty.

……………….

Bookmarks are something I’ve always thought you can never have too many of. Kindle and its electronic brothers have naturally gone a step toward making the old-fashioned paper bookmarks obsolete, but there must be more than a few of us who hope that never happens. There was a time before they went out of business that Borders offered its customers a series of very stylish bookmarks that I continue to use. Simple but bold, black and white lithographic designs characterize the bookmarks offered by Borders in its last two years of business. Only wish I had the full set of designs they produced. Below are three examples.