Thamnophis Sirtalis: Better Known As . . .

On the most ordinary of days, occasionally we’ll have an unordinary experience. Such was yesterday. At ten to five, as I was trying to pull dinner together, Daniel came running into the house with a look of surprise on his face. The story he told was that he was playing in the backyard when something fell out of the tree into the sandbox. It was long and wiggly, so he thought it was a worm. But when he went over to look at it, he discovered that it was a snake. So he ran right in to tell me. I grabbed the camera and we trekked back out to find the snake. By then it had slithered over by the fence. So I snapped a couple of pictures and then (since I’m not a great snake connoisseur) we googled “garter snake” to make sure that’s what it was. Daniel’s comments during the whole thing were expressions of utter engrossment: “Whoa!” “Cool!” And my personal favorite, largely due to the fact that it was uttered with the whispered awe that can only be inspired by a seven-year-old boy’s first encounter with a snake in the wild, “Wooow!!!”

Dinner was late.