I wasn’t sure why the cat had been yelping at the basement window for two weeks, but I knew it couldn’t be good when the curtain started moving.

After clearing away two years’ worth of mummified spiders, I pulled the curtain back to see the intruder: a small garter snake, which flinched and hissed at me in its warm spot in the spring sun. Kinked, yellow-striped and still scaled with that black-green color, it produced a stink rivaling Asian lady beetles.

Somehow I fished a pair of tongs out of a drawer in the house and grabbed the snake before it could duck back out through the window, tossed it in a plastic ice cream tub, and carried it outside to fling into the grass.

It bit the tongs three times.

Although we’re still in the middle of winter, spring’s teased us for the past couple weeks, and those of us who live anywhere remotely near a field might have to deal with pests like these on a regular basis.

In truth, snakes do a lot of good, and it’s actually illegal to kill them in Nebraska (food for thought when you run them down with the mower).

They keep away bugs like the tremendous radioactive spiders that inhabited my basement the summer before the snakes.

During the summer of the snakes, in total, I had eleven of these critters (all from one nest) crawl into my basement—sometimes two or three at a time—through a small hole in the window that was surprisingly hard to fix.

They busted their way through tape, foam, and gel insulation before I finally managed to keep them out.

In the meantime, I pulled back the curtain every morning to find multiple snakes lined up against the glass, flicking red tongues in and out.

After I got tired of loading them up in a bucket to take out into a field, I researched snake repellent—nope, can’t do that without also driving my indoor pet snake up the wall.

Traps?

I set glue traps up by the window and, the first time a garter stuck to one, I bawled my eyes out before pouring cooking oil over it to set it free.

When I ran out of traps, I resorted to turquoise duct tape.

Every morning I hauled out tape-loads of snakes.

Why not pest control? Why not let the cats hunt them?

Because I have to believe it’s worth trying to work with the environment in some way.

And to save money. And I love snakes.

And I really, really hated those things but I felt guilty doing anything else to them.
Be kind to your neighborhood snakes, people, please; they do a lot of good.

Still—carrying them out in buckets, in old crayon boxes, in bags, I’ll admit I wondered what the point was.

But I shaded my eyes and let them go anyway, watching them leave trails in the grass.

And I hoped.