Me and my mama, 2016
I was out for a bike ride enjoying the cool of mid-morning, letting my mind wander as my legs pedaled. As I was coming around a bend on the bike trail, something to the left caught the corner of my eye. “A snake!” my brain registered as my heart raced and my fingers gripped the handlebars. “No way, “ I countered, “it’s too early in the morning for snakes to be out on the trail”. (Where did I get that bit of misinformation?) In the split second of this inner conversation, I had time to reflect that it was an interesting snake with pale tan segments contrasting with orange bands. Kinda like a black and yellow King snake but with different colors. “You should turn around and take a photo so your husband can see it. He could probably identify it and his first graders would think it was cool,” my brain said. However, my racing heart countered with the more reasonable, ”Are you kidding???!! No way are you turning around, just keep pedaling.”
Perhaps you’ve intuited that I am not fond of snakes. Truth be told, I hate snakes and am snake-a-phobic. (I am sure there is a scientific name for this fear). But it wasn’t always so. When I was about five or six years old, I used to play in a field across from our house on Blue View Street in Redding, California. Oh, the adventures I had in that vast expanse of wonder! One day, with an empty coffee can in hand, I went hunting and guess what I found? Massive amounts of Red Racers–tiny, cute, wriggling snakes. I proudly gathered them up in the can and brought them into the house to show my mother, who happened to be talking on the phone with one of her friends. “Mama, look, what I found!” I nearly shouted with excitement. Well, she took one look at the contents of the can and yelled, “GET THOSE SNAKES OUT OF HERE!!! “What?! What is the matter with her,” I wondered. “Why is she so upset? They are so cute.” But I did as I was told.
I’m not sure what happened to change my adoration of snakes into fear and loathing. I suspect it had something to do with the older brothers of my best friend, Kellene. They took great delight in torturing us with cruel pranks involving unsuspecting things like toads and katydids.
Years later, when I was in my thirties, my mom and step-father came for a visit. By this time, I was a mother of two. We were hiking on Stevens Trail in Colfax, admiring the wildflowers and all of a sudden I thought I saw a snake. I sucked in my breath and jumped back towards my mom. Which in turn, made her scream and clutch me. When Dennis looked more closely, he declared, “It’s only a stick.” Mama and I laughed shakily, which soon gave way to adrenaline-releasing, hysterical laughter. We walked more gingerly for the rest of the hike, giving the boys the lead.
So, when I was asked to travel to Sudan and Kenya in 2006, one of the questions I posed to my travel companion was, “Are there snakes there?”. His calm reply, “I’ve never seen any.” “Whew, I can go then!” I convinced myself. At some point during that first trip, he brought out his snake bite kit. A bit confused, I said, “I thought you said there were no snakes in Kenya.” His tongue-in-cheek reply, “No, I said, I’d never SEEN any snakes in Kenya.” This is when I discovered that snakes liked to hang out in the corn fields (a place I’d used to relieve myself more than once) and tea fields (another place I loved to wander). And in case you are wondering, I’ve only seen one snake in Africa and that was on my first trip. It was tiny and rather insignificant, on a dirt path in a zoo in Nairobi. No snake bite kit needed.
“Picking” tea leaves in Kenya, 2006
What does this all have to do with Mother’s Day, you might ask? Well, it certainly wasn’t what I had envisioned writing. Honestly, I intended to write about the beautiful qualities of my mama–her kindness, generosity, brilliance, gift of hospitality and her laughter–and how much I miss her. All those things are true, but this story slithered out of me.
Happy Mother’s Day.
Always Mercy,
Pamela
Farm with tea and corn, rural Kenya
Snakes like it here!
