Char-La Fowler, a pastor’s wife in Charleston, South Carolina and a dear friend of the Moore family, sent me the following email today, and it made my household’s morning:
“I enjoyed reading your ‘All Things Dark and Terrible’ essay this morning, especially in light of the copperhead we killed Monday night. The one my personal, earthly dragon-slayer, my husband Calvin, hunted down and killed 4 feet from the swingset, after it had coiled up and raised its nasty little diamond-shaped head to strike. It was a juvenile, just hatched live from its unseen mother. Part of a litter that averages between 4 and 7, but can be up to 14. I recall in-between the loud thumps of my racing heart and my mad dash for the flat-head shovel, repulsively thinking that we were in a live drama of Genesis 3 right in my own backyard. At that moment and those that followed, the enmity between the snake and the woman could not have been greater!
“My son Richard, almost 12, wanted to watch the decapitation and then couldn’t wait to hold up the headless body and examine the guts that had bulged out. ‘We need a magnifying glass! Somebody go get the magnifying glass!’ Henry, just 3 and barefoot, was entirely too close but impossible to keep back, wide-eyed and yelling and jumping with excitement. He later examined the lifeless thing laying on the patio table as long as we would let him. Calvin, for his part, seemed a little taller and later dissected the head to get a better look at the fangs. (You may collect more years, but some things never change.) The girls, on the other hand, took one look at it, were thoroughly disgusted, and went back inside to attend to such important matters as Mr. Popper’s Penguins and Hannah Montana.
“This Mom was still up at 2 AM, thinking about copperheads in the grass and in the garage and under the beds, ready to strike little hands and feet skipping about care-free and oblivious. Not to mention Richard’s hands and feet, which are now larger than mine, but like nothing better than to venture into the woods, kicking over logs and picking up sticks for no reason at all. Every solution I could craft — moth balls, ferrel cat, a move to Minneapolis/St. Paul — was no real solution at all. I didn’t go to sleep until I realized the futility of such dives into self-sufficiency and called on the ultimate Dragon-slayer to protect my children when I cannot. And even when I am thinking that I can.
“Yes, some pretty hard evidence of the Fall was testifying loudly in my little corner of the world Monday night. And in that moment I gladly joined my uprooted impatiens in crying out for the final redemption.”
And I join this brave pastor’s wife, and her uprooted flowers, and the rest of the creation in looking forward to the day when the original snake’s head is crushed for good.
