Photo and Commentary ©2025 by Maylan Schurch
Sabbath, March 1, 2025
A few days ago as Shelley and I were walking along a trail near our neighborhood, we spotted this snake right in our path. I’m going to take a deep breath and boldly declare that it’s a garter snake, knowing full well that a Google Images search provides me with all sorts of garter snakes that look different from this one.
But this particular breed, or brand, was a familiar sight on the South Dakota prairie where I grew up. After the first startlement on seeing it, I myself would gaze at it with benign approval. I had learned at school that garter snakes help your garden by eating insects that want to consume it.
My mother, however, was horrified when she saw one. She had been a schoolteacher herself, and this garter-snakes-are-our-friends information was probably tucked away in some little-used file cabinet in her mind. But if she spotted a garter snake in our driveway, or even in our garden, she would snatch a hoe from its resting-place and slice-and-dice it into oblivion. I would try to reason with her, but it was no use. “I’m not going to let that thing get into the house,” she would snarl.
The poet Emily Dickinson, though not as militant as Mom, understood this feeling, and expressed it in her poem “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass.” It concludes this way:
Several of nature’s people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;
But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.
The Bible, of courses, speaks of Satan as “that old serpent.” It might be a good idea to refresh your memory about the devil’s deceptions and inevitable defeat. Ready? Take a breath, and click this link: