My neighbours knew to come to my door when they found a snake in their garden. But why did I get it in the first place?
SCHOOL STARTS THIS week, so it's goodbye to relaxed parenting and back to the military regime of early mornings in the dark, packed lunches, organising after-school care, homework duty, early nights and making sure everyone is where they're supposed to be at the right time and wearing the correct uniform.
The sigh you hear is not necessarily one of relief. The gear-shift that will happen this week is probably why the beginning of the academic year has become the time for resolutions, rather than New Year.
My resolution: learning to say No.
No. No. No. (I'm practising.) "Maybe" may be easier - a sort of way station to No. Maybe.
We'll see. I'll think about it. I'd love to but my schedule is packed already. Talk to my agent.
(My daughter, reading this column in advance, says: "You don't need to learn to say No, you say No often enough.") I still think I'm one of those unfortunate people whose first instinct is always to say Yes, but being a Yes person can be more about making other people happy rather than yourself, which is why we Yes people tend to suffer from doormat-itis - not to mention hidden resentments.
Saying Yes to life has its benefits, though. Scary things you might not otherwise do may turn out well and make you glad you took the risk. Taking on projects outside your comfort zone can stretch you towards discovering talents you didn't know you had.
Yes can be a good thing, but may also have disturbing consequences. Here is a perfect example of my dilemma.
We got a phone call from a neighbour the other night. "Hi, we haven't met, I live nearby. Have you by any chance lost a snake?" Now, the No person would instantly deny it, even if they had a snake. Sensible people who would never even consider allowing snakes into their homes would reply in confusion, "You must have a wrong number", or suspect a prank call.
But we're not sensible people, are we? So the answer my husband gave was, "Yes - that could be our snake." Could be? Absolutely has to be, more like.
Our neighbour had done some research. They had asked around the neighbourhood and you know how the bush telegraph works - especially in regard to snakes. It seems that our pencil-slim 12-inch corn snake had grown to the length of an anaconda while living in the wilds of Sandycove.
I shouldn't have said Yes to the snake. It was bound to cause heartbreak because it is a snake after all, and not really meant to be living in a glass vivarium eating defrosted baby mice.
So the snake did the sensible thing and escaped two months ago. Many tears were shed over its loss. Snakes are great pets, winding themselves around your arm, their skin like velvet, and looking up at you with their glassy eyes.
But now it turns out that the snake found tropical paradise a couple of hundred meters away on a beautifully decorated south-facing warm stone patio, with a lovely wooden deck to sleep under and a variety of lush vegetation around which to wrap itself while imagining its birthplace in warmer climes.
Fortunately, the neighbour is a saint with a creative mind and reckons that with a snake living under your deck or even under your floorboards, you'll never have a mice problem in your house.
She found the snake last week, sleeping on a hot stone in the sun. She took a picture of it and e-mailed it to us. It's definitely our snake.
It's not venomous, it shies away from people and it's no harm to anyone but mice, I assured her. And I thanked her for providing it with such a good home, since we had been mourning the snake and were happy to know it was alive.
However, cold weather is coming and we have to catch the snake for its own good, for our neighbours' peace of mind and also because we took responsibility for it and need to make sure it has a good life.
People who don't appreciate snakes may not realise that losing a snake with which you've made an emotional bond is like losing a cat or a dog.
So, there I was last week dashing down to Reptile Haven in Temple Bar on my lunch break to get advice about snake-catching. Get a wide-mouthed plastic bottle, put a "furry" inside, wrap the bottle in heating pads and then hope the snake sets up home in its new condo.
Snakes want food and heat, being the logic. And once the snake coils itself in the bottle and eats, it goes to sleep, ready to be caught.
So there I was, delivering supplies to my neighbour who was quite happy to allow me to set the traps under her deck as long as she didn't have to look at the dead baby mice.
We haven't caught the snake yet. As my daughter pointed out, the snake has survived perfectly well on wild-caught food in the microclimate of my neighbours' garden, which is paradise, so why should it want to climb into a plastic bottle?
Oh my. I am like Eve accepting the apple. How different our lives would have been if Eve had just said No.
kholmquist@irish-times.ie
