Jennifer Plesko

I’m what most people would consider a “grown-up.” I’ve got a mortgage (and a rent payment), I pay taxes, I go to Home Depot, I have a subscription to Southern Living, I go to bed before 11:00. But no matter how old I get, there are still times when a girl needs her dad.

For instance, a couple of weeks ago, hubby had torn down the aviary in our backyard. (The former owner was a falconer, which always makes me think of this) but he didn’t have time to haul the debris to the curb. So when I was there alone that weekend, I decided I would do it.

I started taking the lattice piece by piece off the pile and carrying it to the front yard. I got down to the bottom piece and saw this brown pile sitting in the middle of the lattice. At first I thought it was a massive dog turd, so I picked up the edge of the lattice and tried to knock it off. That’s when I noticed the turd had eyes. It was snake.

I tried not to wet myself as I slowly set the lattice back down to the ground. *sigh* I always run into disgusting creatures when hubby is out of town. I couldn’t tell if it was dead or not. He wasn’t moving, and I had taken about 20 layers of junk off the top of him before I knew he was there, and he hadn’t budged the whole time. I noticed one of my dog’s tennis balls next to my foot, so I threw it. It bounced right next to him before landing halfway across the yard. He still didn’t budge, so assuming he was dead, I went to the garage and got a shovel to try to remove him. When I slid the shovel underneath him, he slowly began to slither and slip between the holes in the lattice. My heart leaped out of my mouth and landed on the grass.

No matter how much I hate snakes, I knew killing one would scar me for life. Plus I’d probably do it wrong. That’s when I got on the horn and called my dad.

He was over in about five minutes, and I led him to the back yard to show him the hideous thing. The snake hadn’t completely crawled under the lattice, so he was kind of half on, half off. This was one freaking lazy snake. I mean, what else could I have done to this thing? It was like trying to rouse a teenager for school.

Ever the Eagle Scout, dad walked up and knelt close to it. “Ooh, my goodness he’s pretty! That looks like a bullnose snake.” Then he went all Crocodile Hunter on me and PICKED IT UP BY THE TAIL and proceeded to give me a biology lesson.

“See how he flattens himself out like that? He does that to make himself look bigger when he’s mad. It makes him look like a cobra. Wow look how long he is!”

I expected the next word out of his mouth to be “Crikey!”

I pinned myself against the fence as Dad walked across the yard to the street holding out the four-foot-long snake at arm’s length, which was writhing and thrashing and seriously pissed. He dropped the snake in the back of the truck as if it were a piece of rope, said “See ya later, sweetie”, and drove off to a field to let it go free.

I don’t think he’ll ever get tired of me calling him to come exterminate for me, but he could at least act a little less non-chalant so I don’t feel like a total goober.

“Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?”