Bloggingham Tales: Spakes and Sniders

We interrupt our regularly scheduled pencil skirt musings for an emergency announcement. The midlife crisis post I had planned for today full of Easter hats and hormonal prose will have to wait.

I am a mess!! Bloggingham Destruction Renovation is going well. For over two months I’ve been purging from attic to basement, room by room in search of my Zen space. I’ve thrown away everything from college papers to exes T-shirts to fountain pens bought in 1977 to at least twenty computer cords I have no idea what to do with and huge cellphones from 1988. So there I am giddy with glee over the removal of a ton of trash and junk (literally a ton) about to roll away on a big trailer out of my way and out of my life forever when the wild animal kingdom shows up.

Picture this: I am standing on the steps of the porch. Number one son is standing on the step below me. Handyman helper #2 (very cute but jail bait) is standing behind him on the walkway. I am about to wave bye bye to the big mess I’ve purged from Bloggingham (yay me!) when………

…a snake crawls out from the grass right in front of me.
I kid you not.

There is a shovel. A blue one. A snake. A shovel. Three people.

"Kill the snake!" I scream. "Get it! Don't let it get away. Kill the snake!"

Helper #2 who was apparently paying attention in science class said, “No, Ms. Pencil Skirt, snakes are very important to the environment.“

“Not if he crawls in my house!!!“ said I, the calm and authoritative one.
KILL THE SNAKE.

“But it’s not even poisonous. See?“

KILL THE SNAKE.

"I don't see any reason to kill it, Ms. Skirt......"

“It will kill any mice that might be here, Mom, think about it……" said not-too-old-to-send-to-his-room-still child of mine.
Neither man/child can see that the appropriate royal thing to do is to cut off its head.
“Give me that shovel. Off with his head!!“ (don't ask me how I knew it was male, I just knew)
and just as I was about to reach for the little blue shovel to do the job myself my only child announces,

"Mom! there's a spider crawling on your neck."

Other boy has foot on the snake reluctantly waiting for me to kill it. My son is between a captured ugly snake and a long-legged poisonous species crawling on his mother.

“Kill it!“ I screamed back.

“But no, Ms. P….we can’t …in science class….."

I do not have time to argue with these fools. I had to save myself from a swift brown recluse death by bosom biting. And how would I explain this to anyone in the emergency room before I expire?

“Shut UP you over there. Not the snake…yes! The snake…..Kill the spider! The snake. The spake and the snider. Kill ‘em both. (his foot is still on the head of said spake communing with nature in some faraway reunion with science 101) Where, where??! Get it off me…..“

At which point my only child slapped me.

He missed. Spider heads south. At the same time my phone starts vibrating in my pants pocket (that sounded so sordid) ..oops wrong post…that sentence belongs in the midlife crisis posts - I did not set it to vibrate!!! Why now? Who could be calling at a time like this?
I swear this property is possessed.

After some amount of high-C squealing the likes of which Joan Sutherland never heard and one rather uncoordinated strip-tease during the ceremonial renting and tearing of clothes in the house, I find….

Half the spider.
Resting on the Queen’s…um….yes….there.
Oh the humanity.
The indignity.
The smattering of midlife laughing from the wings.

Stop laughing.

By the time I got back outside with none of my dignity intact I’ll tell ya, the soft-hearted boy with not a drop of head-rolling blood left in him had let the snake go back into the grass. I am now forced to ditch my flip flops and wear high-heeled steel toed boots outside the rest of the summer thank you very much.

The phone rings. It is my ex-husband.
"How could you raise a boy who can't chop off a snake's head?! Who are these friends of his? "

"What is the matter? Why are you blubbering?" asked the boy's father.

"Because the snake in the grass got a reprieve while I wasn't looking and I had to kill a spider in my own shirt. It's been a horrible day and I need to shower with Clorox!"

He could not stop laughing long enough to even continue the conversation at which point I hung up on him for the fifth time in two weeks and vowed to never ever ever speak to another man for the rest of my life. He will be thrilled.

**This concludes our brief but blundering hiatus from midlife speculation.
I will return tomorrow.
Cleaner.
Calmer.
De-spidered. **

**Thanks to Everyday Goddess for toasting this post as one of her Posts of The Week.**