The husband and I celebrated our five-year wedding anniversary yesterday, so he came down to hang out. He left this evening and called me when he got home to tell me he’d gotten there safely. I was on Rook’s cell phone, and it was making a lot of staticky noise, so I left the room and went upstairs to see if it’d get better. It really didn’t, so I came back down to my cave and pulled back the sheet which serves as a door and saw something moving in the room. Crawling across one of my sneakers was a little black garden snake. Figuring that I’d have an easier time catching it if Rook helped, I shouted into his room to get him to come help me, and he popped in with a flashlight. I said bye to the husband so I could free up both hands, and Rook and I began the hunt.

It had been crawling along one of my shoes near the south wall where the computer desk and wooden desk are as well as my steamer trunk and shoe shelf. It crawled behind the trunk where Rook managed to grab its tail briefly before it disappeared along the east wall where the bed is. After moving a lot of random books and shoes around, we got the steamer trunk out from under the wooden desk, but no snake. So we started moving stuff away from the bed in order to look under there. It’s an old bunk bed, so it’s not far off the ground, leaving little room to look under. Nothing there, so I moved my suitcase and some boxes from the nook beside the bed, letting Rook get a better look under there. He found the snake in that corner, and in the instant it took him to grab the flashlight for a better look (that corner is really dark), it was gone already. We really couldn’t move the wire-frame organizer (one of those wheely white wire things with basket-like shelves) very well out of that corner, so he tried looking into the far corner of the room under the bed while I watched the other end of the bed for signs of the snake. It was then that we realized the snake hadn’t actually gone under the bed; it had climbed the wires of the organizer and was up on one edge. Rook managed to grab the little guy (he was barely over a foot long) while he was trying to get under the bed, and we put him in a Mountain Dew box to show to Dad before taking him outside in the rain. The garden snake will have a better chance of finding spiders and crickets outside than in here, after all. It didn’t really bother me to have a snake in the room; I just didn’t want to accidentally step on him one day or drop a bookbag on him.

So thanks to Rook, snake catcher extraordinaire, the little guy is outside with the other snakes. Goodbye, little snake. You were cute, but you were in the wrong place. Besides, I think Rook had a hell of a lot of fun chasing him down, hehe.