I saw the smallest snake of my life today. It was so small I thought it was a large earthworm, you know, one of those huge invasive worms that people use as fishing bait. There are tons of them in the garden beds here. I think the previous owner thought he was helping the soil by releasing them? He had a lot of good intentions; it was the follow-through that he was bad with.
But it wasn’t a worm. Just a tiny, tiny ringneck snake. I caught a glimpse of reddish-orange behind its head as it slithered through the gravel surrounding the drainage pipe I was attempting to dig out. And then the impossibly small spiral curve of its tail and the matte gray-black of its scales. I wanted to take a picture, but my phone was inside, and anyway it had already disappeared into the gravel.
Of course I talked to it; I talk to everything that has a face, and plenty of things that don’t. I told him he was the smallest snake I had ever seen, really just phenomenally tiny, so little! And all of the nonsense one says to impossibly small creatures.
Even though I live in the woods, and moved to the woods specifically so that I could have more chance encounters with impossibly small creatures, I still get trapped in the idea that this is my house, my garden, my land. It’s easy to look around and see nothing but tasks that need to be done: soil to sow, leaves to rake, gravel to dig. I see projects, as if this place were a work in progress, not yet a true home, when in fact it already is a home to countless other things aside from myself.
And when something calls my attention to this, whether it is a tiny snake in the gravel or a bird nest in the fence or the rabbits under the shed, the sense of disconnect is dizzying. Or maybe just the opposite; maybe it’s the sudden awareness of connection, that indeed life is going on all around me and I’m too distracted to notice it slipping by, that throws me off-balance.
Kneeling there in the mud, I wondered whether I really needed to move the pipe. I wondered if anything I was doing in the garden was worthwhile at all. But I do have to move the pipe. I really do -- it shouldn’t be there and it’s causing drainage problems. I tell myself I can pick through the gravel by hand, and that it’s still early enough in the summer that the snakes aren’t laying eggs yet. If I’m careful, the snake will be okay.
It’s inevitable that I will cause inconvenience or harm to some of the other things living here -- I certainly don’t feel any guilt about pulling up the wild mustard by the fistful. I can’t become paralyzed into inaction, or prioritize the comfort of a tiny snake over something that will cause irreparable harm to my house, which would eventually happen if I don’t fix the damn drainage.
Still. I wonder how long it will take me to forget the tiny snake. I hope it takes a very long time.
