Eden Interrupted

I am visiting my son Lock and his partner, Ken, at their house in the Berkshires. The weather is perfect: warm temperatures, bright sun, clear skies. From their place you can see across valleys to the Catskill Mountains.

My favorite spot is by the koi pond, which Lock designed and built. It’s roughly oval in shape, lined by uneven stones, and rimmed with spikey purple ajuga and leafy hostas. At one end a seated Buddha surveys the pond and at the other, water pours over a rough-edged cement disc, splashing into the pond, creating a constant bubbling sound.

The koi are brightly colored: orange and gold, blue with white and black streaks and shimmering yellow. When they swim toward the surface I catch flashes of iridescent color, curving and twisting as they mill together, swimming in a dance that mesmerizes me.

The koi share the pond with a number of large and small frogs. Smaller ones hang against rocks under water, taking an occasional swim, while the larger ones claim space either in a potted exotic fern, or on the rocks nearby. Every now and then, for reasons known only to frogs, they begin a cacophony of croaking, the thin skin of their lower chins swelling to impressive proportions.

I am sitting in a weathered Adirondack chair with my feet up on a wooden table, wearing a hat against the bright sun, a T-shirt and jeans. My feet are bare.

A red-trimmed plastic container of sugar water hangs in a nearby hydrangea and tiny ruby throated humming- birds are busy feeding.  Nearby a wren is scoping out the wren house hanging in the same hydrangea.

In the hydrangea behind me, in a hole in the bark only about a foot off the ground, chickadees are nesting. They fly in and out of the hole, perching in branches near me and shaking their wings loose as if perhaps the confines of the hole give them more of a squeeze than they really like.

The sun is melting my muscles, my bones, even. I marvel at the quiet pleasure of this small garden. I have book in my lap but I don’t open it. Heaven, I think, closing my eyes. This is heaven.

I doze for a while and waking, I see, on the far side of the pond, a thick black snake with narrow yellow stripes slithering down a rock at the pond's edge. It is sliding slowly toward the water, its flat head swaying ominously. In the pond, directly below where the snake is descending, a bullfrog is sitting on a rock, fright-frozen to his spot, his eyes bulging.

A shiver runs through me. The snake is going to grab that frog. I hate snakes. Is it politically incorrect to hate snakes? I know we are supposed to be one with nature and all that—I do carry spiders out of the house--but snakes are vile. Poisonous or not, I am terrified of them.

 “Lock!” I shout. “A snake! A snake in the pond!”

Lock comes charging around the house and flings his hat at the predator. The snake darts into the low bushes, gone like a shot. The frog hits the water equally fast.

Eden interrupted, once again, by a serpent.