Because humor is funnier when you know it's true.
Scary suburbia
Moving to our first house in the suburbs offered the promise of an idyllic life. We bought into a nice development of homes built on formerly wooded hills. Though there were only a few vestiges of woods left, we were treated to the occasional deer or raccoon in our backyard. Lovely.
Our neighbors mostly had white collar jobs, manicured lawns, and nicely appointed homes – a lifestyle into which we were reluctantly dragged. One neighbor even had a decorative “wreath of the season” on her front door. I refused to compete with that. One day she told us that a small bird had actually built a nest inside her wreath. And so, when the mother bird laid its eggs, she posted a sign asking visitors to please use their back door so as not to disturb the soon-to-be family. Very cute.
Problem was that not all beings were capable of reading her sign, as one day she emotionally told us that she found the bird eggs broken on her front stoop and that they had apparently been eaten! Before I could jump to the conclusion that a bigger bird or hawk had raided the nest, she went on to say that a neighbor had observed that a large snake had slithered up against the front door, pulled down the eggs, and had breakfast. Wait, what? A snake?! Was this one of those over-achieving serpents that was evolving ahead of the rest of its den?
Anyway, she was telling us because she wanted us all to know that there was now a large snake active in the neighborhood. Is “active” a strong enough word to describe what we were facing? How do I know that this raw omelet-eating demon isn’t so skilled as to slither up against our front door, rap our brass knocker, and fall into our house upon opening the door?! I was on high alert, made higher when I was trimming our backyard landscaping and found a snake skin that had been shed in one of our shrubs! Apparently Mr. Slither decided to move next door.