A mouse reappeared in the kitchen this rainy night, precisely two weeks from the rainy night I trapped the last. Rooted around tonight for the remaining traps and found one with a partial snakeskin leaving iridescent traces in the glue, a mirror of the snakeskin found in the gravel in front of the house yesterday.
I razed the garter snake haunt weeks ago, a primitive fire pit built a few feet from the front door, convenient to the kitchen cupboard where the traps are best laid. (Compared to NYC, the mice here are naïfs; the two I've taken each lasted only a few minutes from baiting to disposal.) Notable that I have not seen the snakes in the yard since but though stealthy they clearly have not gone far from their preferred food source. In driving them off I broke one of their tails, an inadvertent act turned a haunting omen in a moment not long ago when I was more consumed with the notion of my own fate.
Funny that (in principle, at any rate) I should mind snakes in the cupboard less than mice. I have lived with mice and found them uniformly unsympathetic creatures; snakes, while alarming, are possessed with a certain hauteur. A recurring nightmare as a child of falling into a swarm of snakes carpeting a neighbor's front yard; a memory of an agitated water snake by the creek in flood; my mother’s unreliable story of the constrictor approaching my crib; the shrieking surprise of a garter dropped onto my head as a pubescent prank. (Are these comparatively mundane household encounters only untroubling because the present is too exhausting to keep up with?)
The cupboard is pitched over an open crawlspace long since slated for enclosure for reasons other than pests; recent events suggest it should be advanced in priority. A contracting job well done may deter them permanently. I think of the D.H. Lawrence poem where he is awed by an adder, then throws a rock to drive it away, and then regrets it.
The archaeolgical salad spinner has been casually replaced for a princely sum. I imagine david would not approve, as I do not.