Ghost Skin

 

 

“Wrestle gently with snakes.”- Valley Haggard, from her book
A Halfway House for Writers

I’ve always been terrified of snakes, have been since the time I was maybe eight and wandering around in the Monongahela forest behind my grandfather’s house. I didn’t know him much. I knew the woods better.

Everything was calm there under the branches. I think it was spring. And then in a patch of leaves and pine needles right in front of me, a snake. It was enormous. I’m sure it was. It was the copper color of last year’s final leaves and striped with diamond patterns. Its eyes were narrow. I knew it wanted to kill me.

I ran hard and fast out of where it had been safe just a minute before, down the hill to the back porch of the house where my grandfather lived his mysterious life. I never told a soul and I never went back into that part of the forest.

Last summer, for the first time in decades, snakes showed up in my yard. A long black racer draped itself on the walkway in front of my gate and wouldn’t let me pass. There was no threatening behavior on his part. His sleek, unexpected presence stopped me where I stood. After the third time, I started looking for him. When he wasn’t there, I checked places where he might be. I missed him. I missed whatever it was he was trying to tell me.

A garter snake surprised me in the yard one day, warming herself in a patch of summer sun just where I was walking. We were both terrified by the suddenness of each other. She turned herself into a green and yellow coil, all determination, no venom. I stood back but didn’t turn away from her. She was beautiful in her checkerboard skin.

We both watched each other from a safe distance until she unlooped, stretched, smoothed into the day lilies. Her eyes were round. I watched until she slipped away, her small head lifted. I took her picture before she left.

At the end of summer, there was a small snakeskin under the step, etched with a ghostly checkerboard design.

My Chinese zodiac sign is the snake.

My skin is shedding.