I am all about traditions.

Take Thanksgiving, for instance. I mean, is there any other holiday so steeped in tradition as Turkey Day? I have eaten the same thing every Thanksgiving since 1968. Well, maybe since 1969. I don’t think I had teeth yet that first Thanksgiving. Although I did find a doctors note in my baby book where he recommended bacon as an appropriate first food for a 4 month old. I think it was on the same page that recommended Crisco as a sunblock. Ah, the good ol’ days….

Anyway, every Thanksgiving we have the same menu. The Hubby once asked me if I got bored eating the same meal every year. Yes, because having the same meal ONE TIME A YEAR is oh-such-a-rut….

One year I got really crazy, and changed things up by making mashed sweet potatoes instead of canned. Not only that—instead of topping them with mini-marshamallows—-I made a custard topping. I know, I am a rebel.

Since moving into the Halfway-finished House, we have developed new holiday traditions. Every year, we celebrate 4th of July at Rancho de la Roca. We spread our blanket on the lawn, I take the kids canoeing, they do some bounce-house-jumping and some snow-cone-eating, and then when darkness falls we settle back and watch the fabulous fireworks show. Afterwards, we head home for another Moreno 4th of July tradition: Daddy’s Backyard Firework Extravaganzza.

It’s generally a pretty low-key event, just me and the kids on the back porch while The Hubby sets off his wares in the pasture. There was that one last year that exploded too violently, throwing itself off The Hubby’s homemade launch stand and sending giant purple fireballs at his head. But other than that one incident, it’s pretty tame.

Until now….

Back when The Hubby and I got married—which is coming up on 20 years this September—I promised I would never let him get bored. At the time, he thought that was a good thing. He has since reminded me that there is no physical, binding document to force my compliance, and has graciously agreed to let me out of the terms of that particular arrangement. Nice try….

But really, it wasn’t my fault. I mean, it wasn’t precipitated by one of my infamous ideas or anything. The story goes like this:

We got home from Rancho de la Roca a little before 10. For some reason, Mason was scared of the fireworks this year, so rather than put him through the trauma of even more loud noises and bright lights, I went ahead and put him to bed.

I came out of his room to sheer chaos. I know—you’re shocked.

I could hear the screams of the children coming from the backyard. All three older kids were down at the chicken coop in hysterics. Ethan and Ramie were outside the coop, and Riley was inside yelling—–

—if you have a teenage daughter, you are familiar with melodrama. Now imagine a teenage girl with MY genes. Oh yeah, now you’re getting the picture….

Where was I? Oh, yeah—so, Riley is in the chicken coop, and she’s screaming, “It’s got Ethel!!! A snake has Ethel!!! It’s killing her!!! She’s not moving!!! She’s dead!!!”  Meanwhile, I come to the back door and scream back, something along the lines of, “Ethan! Get your sister OUT OF THE CHICKEN COOP NOW!!!”

Now, can I just say that if you had told me 20 years ago—10 years, even—that I would ever in my life be screaming any sentence that included the words “chicken coop,” I would have thought you were crazy. Yet, there I was, screaming for Ethan to convince Riley to get the heck out of the chicken coop.

I ran down to the coop, passing a sobbing Ramie and an exhilarated Ethan on their way up to the house. That boy thrives on some chaos. Don’t know where he gets it. Riley, meanwhile, has finally come out of the coop. She’s sobbing, too, but she’s composed enough to shine the flashlight on the far side of the chicken coop to show me where, indeed, a snake has climbed up the chicken wire among the roosting hens. And Yeti, who is decidedly not a hen, but that fact was only discovered after we’d paid for him and brought him home.

Some panic ensued here for a while. I’m not clear on all the details, but there was some confused running up and down the hill between the house and the coop, some “WHERE IS YOUR FATHER?” being shouted back and forth, some “GO TELL YOUR FATHER TO BRING THE SHOVEL,” and some ear piercing wailing courtesy of the 6 year old, who was sure Ethel was that snake’s belated 4th of July chicken picnic dinner.

I do remember grabbing the flashlight from Riley, and showing The Hubby where the snake had cozied up to the sleeping chickens. I found the snake’s head, and because I like to think myself some sort of pit viper expert (mostly just because I really like saying the words, “pit viper”), determined that he was not, in fact, a venomous snake. At least, he wasn’t a Texas venomous snake. You know, you can never really be sure that someone didn’t buy one of those exotic ultra-deadly imports, get tired of supplying it with live rats, and release it into the wild. But in the heat of the moment, I was comfortable with my assessment.

Besides, it bore an uncanny resemblance to the snake that only a few weeks before had leapt out at me as I tried to determine whether itwas venomous. If you heard that story, you will remember that the hubby didn’t wait for my answer before severing the beasts head from its body.

Now, I am not a snake hater. In fact, I really like snakes. They eat nasty rodents. Nasty rodents that invade your garage and make nests in boxes of wedding keepsakes that you have no choice but to throw away because there is no amount of sanitizing that is going to take “rodent” out of a bouquet of silk flowers. I have coffee mugs that I’ve bleached, scalded, and run through the dishwasher ten times, and I still can’t bring myself to drink out of them. I save them for company.

But a snake’s gotta know his place. Me, human. Dominion over all the animals. You, snake. Crawl on your belly on the dust of the earth. And leave my chickens alone. Genesis, right?

So I have my flashlight expertly trained (it’s an art) on the snake’s head, while The Hubby deftly pins him to the chicken wire with the shovel. Now, chicken wire isn’t really the firmest of surfaces. The snake is pinned, but The Hubby can’t really do any severing, because there’s too much give. The snake isn’t really contemplating the give factor of chicken wire; he’s just looking for something to hold on to. And it just so happens that the closest thing to him is…Ethel.

Before I knew what was happening, the wily serpent had his body wound around Ethel’s body. Ramie is watching out the back door in tears. I’m still feeling mommyguiltfrom having to put the cat down last month; no way am I going to be able to face the 6 year-old and tell her the snake killed her chicken.

So I did the only thing I could do. I grabbed the snake. Of course I did. Doesn’t that sound just like the kind of idiot thing I would do? “How’d ya get those two holes in your arm, Ashley?” “Oh…see there was this snake…” So I have a hold of the snake, and he’s coiling tighter around the chicken, and I’m worrying that my pit viper identification skills far outweigh my constrictor identification skills, and it hits me that I’m not sure which way to pull the snake. I mean, there aren’t really any directional markers on a snake, no easy way to tell “front” from “back”. Wrong way, and I’ve tightened the noose.

Now, the chickens have evidently been to the Jurassic Park T-Rex school of Snake Avoidance, because during this whole time, Ethel does…not…move. None of them do. They are still as bricks. Puffy feathered bricks. Kind of like the squirrel scene in Christmas Vacation, where Diane Ladd is laying unconscious on the floor, and Chevy Chase whispers, “Mom—don’t move!”  (Yes, I just fit two completely different movie references into one paragraph. My blog, my rules to break…).

So as I’m trying to solve the Chinese rope puzzle that is the snake, I say to The Hubby, “Whatever you do, don’t let it get away.”  To which he replies—

“TOO LATE!”

Now, I ask you: does the snake go for the guy who’s been trying to separate his spine at the base of his skull? No. He goes for the crazy woman who has ahold of the rest of his body. So the snake makes a go at me, I throw him to the ground and grab a rake—which The Hubby commandeers, because evidently my rake handling skills don’t live up to my snake handling skills—and The Hubby chops his head of with the shovel. I like to think he put extra vengeance into the act; you know, like “Take THAT, you vile viper. Try to bite my wife, will you?”

I have no pictures of the snake. So I can’t disprove The Hubby’s claim that the snake was only 4 feet long, not 6. And there is no video of the event, either, so The Hubby can’t prove I said anything stronger than, “Oh my goodness.” His word against mine….