A Tale of Two Snakes
We were visiting a friend at a private beach on the pond in Pelham, the town where we lived at the time. The beach was made up of coarse sand and pebbles on the shore of a spring-fed lake.. It was an area meant for the residents only of a particular dead-end road, and there were a couple of other families nearby. Although they all lived on the same road and shared the same beach, the families did not know each other’s names. The adults all kept apart, but the kids were drawn together in play. Suddenly, my two-year-old daughter excitedly pointed out a water snake to me. Her dad had just been telling her about water snakes a few days prior, after they had caught a baby garter snake from the woodpile, and here was one she got to see in person, swimming on the surface of the lake.
“Mom! A water snake!” My daughter wasn’t scared, she was elated and interested. But the other kids were screaming, and their mom grabbed a kayak paddle and went hauling down to the water’s edge to beat the snake to death right before my daughter’s eyes. I regret this moment. It happened fast, before I got a chance to settle the other kids and explain to them that the snake was just minding its own business, swimming across our little space to get to the shoreline on the other side and that it wouldn’t harm them.
These remained unspoken words. Our calm morning ripped from us, I just stood there yelling “Leave it alone!” to that other mom. But she wouldn’t listen to me. Whack! Whack! And why I hadn’t just grabbed the paddle away from her, I’ll never know. I suppose I didn’t want to fight in front of the kids.
My husband and I grew up in Pelham, but that day we realized our daughter wouldn’t get the kind of childhood we wanted to give her if we stayed.
Pelham is growing. Their forests and fields are being filled with subdivision neighborhoods of over-large and over-priced houses set on sub-half-acre lots. But warily do I call them neighborhoods, because they are so grand and stark. We couldn’t walk through any of the conservation lands without stumbling into the backyards of these new houses. New Hampshire’s southernmost town, it is the place to commute from to go to Massachusetts to work. As a result, there are three Dunkin Donuts drive-thrus to choose from within the bounds of Pelham’s 27 square miles of town. Cars passing through made bike riding dangerous. It was hard to call a place so populated by strangers my community.
We left Pelham, and came to the Monadnock Region to live in Francestown. This past summer was my family’s fifth summer in our home here, a little old farmhouse with an attached barn along the South Branch Piscataquog River. No matter which direction we turn, or which part of the yard we stand in, we cannot see any of our neighbors. One of the things that struck us, my husband and I, about living out here is the beauty. The back dirt roads winding through forests and sweeping past hayfields. Still functioning farms. Historic old homes. A lack of modernity and conveniences, almost like we had stepped back through time about 70 years, and life slowed down, and we could breathe and find our values again away from all the distraction. It feels like we escaped the noise and clutter and came to sanctuary.
The year we moved here, my daughter was three. It wasn’t quite summer yet, but unseasonably warm. We had gone over to the town beach on the pond to play by the water while my husband worked on fixing up the old house. There were a few other families at the beach, but the kids were all a bit older, so I dug in the sand with my daughter. While she was filling a bucket of water to bring back to our castle moat, she called, “Mom! A watersnake. Come see!” Faster than me were the older kids, one of whom deftly grabbed the snake up out of the water and let it slide gently between his hands as they all admired it up close. The teenage boy made sure that my daughter got a chance to touch the snake and he was able to answer all of the questions she had about it. “No, water snakes aren’t poisonous. They eat small fish and frogs. This one lives here. We see him every summer.” I knew we had come to the place where we were meant to be. I knew we were home.
