What’s the Coolest Thing Your Mom Ever Did?

She wasn’t like the other moms, that’s for sure.

My mother died the day after the 2016 election. My niece was at her bedside in the hospital and called me. “Memaw can’t let go I think because she needs to hear from you”. She put the phone by my mother’s head and I said all the things one says to a dying mother and meant every word regardless of the complicated ways in which we’d loved each other over the years. She died two hours later. I couldn’t cry. The next day Leonard Cohen died. Then I could cry.

Mother and daughter stuff can be tricky.

Let’s be clear up front: yes, I really loved my mother. And, yes, I didn’t speak to her directly in the final seven years of her life (there’s a book in there).

But my mother did some incredibly cool things in her life.

And I’d have to say that, hands down, the coolest thing my mother did with me when I was a kid was to teach me how to catch garter snakes so they couldn’t bite me and so I didn’t hurt them.

There was a small pond down the hill from our front yard when we still lived in tiny Randolph, New York, and there were a lot of strange and wonderful things living in that pond. Shrill spring peepers were deafening on early spring nights. Mythically huge dragonflies darted over the still surface of the brown water. Delicate water striders dimpled the surface of the water as they skated back and forth.

Slow turtles deliberately pulled themselves up over the lawn to dig holes in the gravel driveway and lay their eggs (during turtle egg-laying season no cars were parked in the driveway….also very cool, right?). Once a snapping turtle came out of the water and watching what that prehistoric throwback did to a very thick piece of branch Daddy held close to its mouth gave me nightmares for weeks.

This may be a false memory because so many are, after all, but I don’t remember ever not being allowed to go down and play by the pond by ourselves. This seems odd given how many little kids drown every year in ponds and swimming pools but maybe things were different then. We were certainly told to stay away from the water and it would have had to be one determined little kid to fight through the stands of cattails and reeds that completely surrounded the pond.

Here’s a memory that’s real, however: me running shrieking up to the house because I’d just seen A SNAKE! Not just seen it, it touched me with its slick dry weird scaliness. It flipped under my unsuspecting leg and disappeared into the long grass.

I was so freaked out that I never stopped running until I got to the kitchen.

Instead of telling me to shut up or go play in traffic my mother stopped what she was doing, took my hand and we walked back down to the pond. I didn’t want to but there was no getting out of it now.

We got down to where the grass was too long to be mowed and Mommy took a stick and began moving it around in the grass. Oh no, there were more of them! Lots of them! I’d never sleep again. She patiently broke off the stick so there was a small fork at the end and used it to quickly pin down the nearest snake right behind its head. It immediately began thrashing wildly and I was frozen, needing to run or pee myself or scream. Then my mom reached down and took that snake’s head between her thumb and forefinger and picked it up!

And then………..

She took my hand and showed me how to hold the thrashing snake firmly right behind its head. And the strangest part of all this is that I let her. I didn’t back away in terror or run screaming (again). I trusted my Mommy and took the snake’s head between my thumb and forefinger and just held it.

And my mother smiled at me.

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