Reflections on the Sixth Week of Spring – Garden Companionsssssssssss

    Friday, Spence walked in the front door with dust on his red tractor cap and mud on his L. L. Bean boots. “I have a garden job that’s perfect for you,” he said.

    I carried a basket of laundry down the hall to join him in the great room and imagined breathing fresh air. “What?”

    “Pick asparagus. We have enough to freeze.”

    “Already?” Usually we don’t pick asparagus until May nor freeze any until June.

    “Yeah.”

    I hesitated. On my last two garden jobs I’d had companions.

    Fresh air. Garden companions. Break from laundry. Garden companions.

    Nearly two weeks earlier, on a warm, blue sky Sunday, I’d agreed to plant the rest of the peas seeds Spence had sprouted. He led me to the old tomato patch in the north garden. Black plastic covered the ground, white PVC pipes formed scaffolds for climbing plants, and holes in the plastic waited for a new seeds.

    “Put two seeds in each hole,” Spence said.

    A two-foot garter snake sunned itself where I needed to kneel. I gazed at the snake.

    “Do you want me to move it before you start?” Spence said.

    “Definitely.”

    He picked up a stick and touched the tip of the garter snake’s tail.

    It circled the warm spot on the plastic.

    Spence nudged the snake again.

    It slithered two feet.

    Nudge. Slither. Nudge. Slither.

    The garter snake moved in a rectangular path back to its starting place.

    “This could take some time,” Spence said.

    “I can wait.” While I inhaled the fragrance of wet spring soil, Spence nudged until the snake crawled under the log walls of the raised onion bed six feet away. I knelt, shoved the trowel into the first hole, and pulled out a scoop of earth with three squiggling worms.

    I could deal with worms.

    Two days later, on a sunny warm Tuesday, I carried knee pads, garden gloves, and two weed diggers to the raised strawberry bed. At the northeast corner lay a small snake exposing half of its brownish back and half of its bright orange underside. The snake didn’t move. Was it dead? “Hey, Spence,” I shouted. “Come look at this.”

    He shut off the hand mower and walked to the strawberry patch. “It’s a dead snake,” he said.

    I could deal with dead.

    I knelt, pulled off the bird netting, and weeded.

    On a break, I checked our Audubon reptile guide. The dead snake was a red-bellied snake which ate slugs and snails that consume strawberries. Too bad the red-bellied snake didn’t survive to slither among the strawberries after I’d finished weeding.

    I closed the guide and went back to the strawberry patch.

    A chickadee sang in a nearby apple tree, bees buzzed, and the hand mower droned. I weeded and crawled to mid patch where a disgusting odor rose from a cup with last summer’s beer and drowned slugs. Fermented death. I pried the cup out of the ground, poured the noxious brew onto weeds in the footpath, and replaced the cup. A foot long red-bellied snake wiggled past the empty cup.

    “May you fill your tummy with lots of slugs and snails,” I’d whispered.

    So, when Spence said he had a garden job for me this Friday, I calculated the likelihood of meeting snakes. High sixty degrees but cloudy. Snakes wouldn’t be sunning themselves, would they?

    “Okay,” I said. 

    “You’ll need a basket for the asparagus.”

    I reached under the sink for my largest picking bucket and followed Spence outside.

    A robin hopped from the wood shed to the blueberry bushes. White cabbage butterflies flitted from dandelion to dandelion.

    I snapped off asparagus spears, placed them carefully in the bucket, and admired new milkweed leaves forming in the asparagus patch. No sunning snakes.

    When I reached the end of the row near the garage where Spence flame weeded white dandelion seed heads, he said, “You just missed stepping on him.”

    Stepping on him? I glanced up from spear-searching in time to see the garter snake slither out of the asparagus patch.

    “He was right where you’re standing,” Spence said.

    Sheesh.

    Okay. The garter snake lived in the north garden, and I was treading on its territory.

    I could deal with sharing the garden as long as it didn’t follow me into the house. Giving the snake a name would help me adjust. But what name?

    I sent a message to my third grade email pal.

    JW: I picked asparagus today, and the garter snake slithered out of the asparagus patch. I think it's the same snake that was sunning itself when I planted peas. I want to give it a name. Do you have any suggestions?

    Email Pal: Snakalious. (Snake - a - lisious)

    His email triggered an image of the garter snake on a white plate with me holding a knife in one hand and a fork in the other. Yuck. I’d expected something like “Stripy” or “Slither.” But I’d asked for help, and I didn’t want to brush off my young friend’s suggestion.

    JW: Snakalicious makes me think of eating because of delicious and nutritious. But eating the snake makes me think yuck. Can you think of another name? Perhaps we could use your idea with a different ending like Snakamongus (snake-among-us). That only reminds me of fungus.

    Email Pal: Snakamazing (Snake – amazing)

    JW: Snakamazing it is!

    Email Pal: HOORAY!!

    Later, while I cut asparagus into pieces for par boiling, I told Spence the name my email pal and I chose for the garter snake.

    “You know there are two of them,” Spence said. “The one today came from under the garage step. When I tilled yesterday, it scooted towards the asparagus patch. It was bigger than the one that sunned in the pea patch.”

   “It didn’t just grow bigger?”

    He shook his head.

    I cut more asparagus, decided I could call both garter snakes Snakamazing, and considered wearing boots the next time I help Spence in the garden.