How To Be New

By the time I got home the other day, the snow had melted enough that the flag stones in front of the door were clear. On one rested a pale green ribbon, a gentle curl warmed by the mild sunlight. The residue of a life changed, a biological palimpsest, in short, a snakeskin.

Last summer I was relaying the flags and unroofed the house of two garter snakes. If they were angry at me for displacing them they never said a word, but just slipped coolly further into their nest. Leaving their revenge for another day, and that day came.

No worse pick than to handle a snakeskin, everyone knows that, so I let it lay. Each morning, each evening it confronted me, it mocked me; some day, it said, you'll touch us and be infected with our bad juju. But I was spared. Today the skin has disappeared.

But I am pensive. For the snake, change is easy, just drop your skin and make a new life in a new one. My bad luck is to be hampered by my old skin, the one I can't quite shed, no matter what comes. Maybe I should have touched the skin and accepted its curse. Maybe I did.