Elizabeth Saunders

Ivy had come to spend the night. We did all the usual things that grandmas do with three year olds. We colored and glued and read books. We played with play-doh and stuck stickers in a book. Then we decided to take a walk in the backyard. We pretended that we were in the jungle. We walked along quietly to sneak up on wild animals. An ant became an elephant. A squirrel was a tiger. A frog sitting by the goldfish pond morphed into a Nile cocodile, and the goldfish were piranahs, the fruit...

I must confess that I used to be one of those people who was terrified of snakes. I think it came from my father who told the story of climbing a ladder to clean out a squirrel nest-box. When he reached in, expecting to pull out a handful of leaves, he pulled out a handful of angry snake. He dropped the snake and backed down the ladder fast as he could. My father went left and took refuge behind a trash can. The snake went right, and was never seen again. "What a funny story!" everyone said,...

Last spring my husband and I visited the Outer Banks. As we walked along the boardwalk at Bodie Island, we spotted a water snake swimming lesisuerly among the reeds. We leaned on the railing and watched it. A woman and a little girl stopped and asked what we were looking at. (At Bodie Island, that's not considered rude, everyone shares their sightings.) I pointed down into the water and said, "A snake. Look. It's right there." That poor lady choked back a scream, grabbed her daughter's...