I’m pretty sure that a Southern California childhood mandates at least two or three childhood photos sporting some sort of reptile. (Although not every child gets such a nifty bowl cut. Evidently bowl cuts are back? RUN AWAY.) In dry, warm places, the things rattling the bushes and dashing (or in this case, lumbering) across the driveway always end up in the house… brought in via cat or child. There’s another snap of the Tech Boy at about this same age with a loop of snake poking out of his shirt. Exciting for a two-year-old, and it’s clearly why we had snakes in bottles in our first apartment (carefully let go after a day – teensy, defensive little sharptails, baby King snakes, the odd legless salamander), and why he’s very much interested in actually buying a rosy boa, or a chameleon as a pet. Or a gecko. Or a Gila monster. Or…
Meanwhile, I did not have that life. My father is not a fan of wildish creatures of any sort, having spent too many summers on his grandmother’s rural properly in Alabama with mosquitoes in the rain barrel out of which they got drinking water, and too many things that hopped, crawled, slithered – or coiled themselves on his warm, sleeping body; my mother has gone so far as having a turtle in her classroom, but no further out of the realm of “fuzzy.” I’m the one who has reptile mania — collecting lizard tails in elementary school (don’t… ask), a shared snake with the biology TA in high school, a snake in my classroom who went on to be our house snake — I don’t know why. We always had hamsters and guinea pigs and fuzzy bunnies and once, memorably and confusedly, ducks, when I was growing up. We had chickens. We goat-sat for the neighbors. None of these things said, “Ooh, you’re going to end up loving snakes.”
Some of us clearly rise from our beginnings. And others of us just drift onto our paths, I guess.
cool slither of scales
slips sinuous through hands splayed,
links of living chain
