The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

The alarm went off this morning at 6 a.m., and I hate waking up that early.

I had bad dreams last night so I wasn't rested, and I started the day out with a headache. I hate headaches.

The kids got into a fight before school, and I really hate fights in the morning.

The fight made us late for carpool and then we were stuck in the bad traffic, and I hate traffic. It was starting to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

We didn't find the snake at Dad's, and I accidentally broke my parents' honeymoon wine bottle, the one covered with wax from years of anniversary candles. I hate not finding the snake, but I really hate breaking the bottle.

I got stuck by a train and was late picking up Emily for her doctor's appointment. She either has a staph infection or a strep infection. I hate infections. We had to rush to get there on time, and I hate rushing.

Our new insurance company didn't have our doctor as our primary care physician. I had to wait on the cell phone for 40 minutes while they figured out their mistake. It was somehow "not their mistake," and we'll end up having to pay for it. I hate paying for other people's mistakes.

"Today is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day!" I said.

"I'm sorry," the insurance man replied. "It's not our fault."

My kitchen's a wreck. My laundry is piled up. My furniture is dusty, and I haven't made my bed in weeks. Most of my basement is in the garage in boxes. I hate chaos.

Our street is getting seal coated, and I couldn't park in the driveway. To get to my house, I had to walk across wet tar, and my shoes got messy on the bottom.

I was taking Claire to dance class and thinking about the missing snake and the possible infections and I rear-ended a Volvo. I hate accidents.

"Today is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day," I told the lady in the Volvo.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Some days are like that."

I didn't get to make dinner again, and I miss cooking.

I had a meeting and church, and I hate meetings.

I didn't have enough wine for my bath, and while I was sitting here typing about my day, a mouse ran across my kitchen floor, and now we can't find it.

It is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

I'm going to bed.

Snakes in the Basement

From the basement came a blood-curdling scream. "Oh my god! Oh my god!" shrieked my sister, Colleen.

I was upstairs in the kitchen at Dad's old house, and Colleen was in the laundry room sweeping up the lint from under the dryer. We'd found a few mouse droppings in the storage room, but no recent signs of any mice, so I figured that she had finally seen a live one. But the screaming didn't stop, and it sounded more serious than a mouse. Maybe a nest of them, I thought.

"Colleen," I hollered. "What's wrong?"

She replied with the unthinkable..."THERE'S A SNAKE IN THE BASEMENT!" and she bounded up the stairs and into the kitchen.

"What? NO WAY!" I replied. "Where?"

"Under the dryer in the laundry room. I almost put my hand under there!!!" And she had. It was at the last minute that she'd decided to use a broom instead.

I asked how big it was without considering that it really didn't matter. There was a SNAKE...ALIVE...IN THE BASEMENT.

If there is anyone on earth more terrified of snakes than me, it is Colleen. She doesn't even like to go in her backyard for fear of them.

"Holy crap!" I replied. "What are we going to do? I'm not going back down there!"

"But we have to," she said. "We have to get the basement cleaned out. Can you kill it because I can't."

Okay, I thought. I can do this. I HAVE to do this. Kirk is in Frankfort. John is downtown. Kyle is at school. It was Colleen and me versus the snake, and by God, we were going to win.

"I'll try," I replied. "Let me get a weapon out of the garage."

I went into the garage to get the shovel only to be reminded that we had taken all of Dad's tools to his new house yesterday. The only thing with a long handle was a sponge mop and a push broom. I grabbed the mop, and we headed back downstairs.

We tiptoed gingerly to the laundry room, both of us standing in the doorway waiting for the other to go first. Colleen spotted a plastic milk crate.

"I'll get on the milk crate, and you look under the dryer," she said.

Just then, Dad came in the back door, and we hollered up at him, "There's a snake in the basement!" He came down with the push broom and walked into the laundry room.

"It's under the dryer," Colleen said.

She was standing on the milk crate and had started lifting the dryer up when it occurred to me that she was raising the side facing me. If there was a snake still under there, it would slither out in my direction.

"Wait!" I yelled. "Let me get the other milk crate first." So Dad slid the other milk crate over to me, and the two of us, armed with a mop and a broom, lifted up the dryer to see a black snake, about 18 inches long, crawling along the wall behind the dryer.

"There it is!" we yelled. I wondered how we were going to kill it with a mop and a broom, but I figured I would just bash it with the back of the mop head. Then Colleen got the idea to go in the garage and get the tree loppers off the wall. It is about an 8 foot long pole with a curved saw at the top. We figured it would at least be something metal to hit it with.

I stood there on the crate with the mop in my hand watching the snake watch me. It crawled one way down the wall and then the other. It stopped between the wall and a dusty can just as Colleen came down with the loppers. I reached back to get the tool, not taking my eyes off the snake. "How am I going to kill this thing?" I thought. The loppers were too tall and got caught in the rafters. I looked up to untangle them, and when I looked back down, the snake was GONE!

"It's gone!" I yelled.

"WHERE?" said Colleen.

"I don't know!!!" I replied.

I thought maybe it had crawled into the can, so I took the loppers and pushed it around. It was a can of WD-40, so there was no way the snake could have gotten into it. Then I thought maybe there was a crack in the wall and the snake was in there. I took the broom and swept along the floor/wall area. Nothing. We looked under the dryer again. Nope. Under the upright freezer. Not there either.

Mind you, we were standing on milk crates this whole time, lifting up old pie tins and dryer sheets with our broom and mop, with a snake loose in the basement and no way to find it or really kill it once we did.

We looked for that damn thing for an hour and did not find it. We both refused to take any boxes home in our vans today in case it slithered into one of them. That's all we'd need is to be driving 65 miles an hour down the Snyder Freeway and have a snake crawl across the brakes!

Tomorrow we go back, armed this time with a rake and a shovel. I'll let you know how it goes...

Saving Time in a Bottle

In the corner of the garage in crumbling plastic bags sat hundreds of seashells from Sanibel Island. My sisters and I had collected them over the course of two, week-long trips, one in 1973 and the other in 1975.

I remember those trips like they were yesterday. We stayed in a cottage right on the beach. Mom had to bring all the linens, pots and pans, dishes, food, clothes, beach toys, and anything else we might need while we were there. I'm sure it wasn't much of a vacation for her, but for us, it was paradise.

We'd wake up every morning and head to the ocean. Dad liked the Gulf because it was calm, and Sanibel was even gentler than Pensacola or St. Pete. We could wade out for several yards and not be any deeper than our knees. The sandbars were excellent at low tide, and there was a shallow "pool" of ocean that we girls could safely play in pretty much by ourselves.

Our favorite pastime by far, however was to kneel in the water where the waves hit the shore and search for shells. Colleen and I would take our buckets and our sifters and scoop up load after load of shells. I can still see us kneeling there with our backs against the ocean, and our sun-kissed cheeks covered with Coppertone.

"Look, Sharron! I found a cat's eye!" Colleen would cry and drop it in her bucket.

"I found an olive," I'd say, and we'd look harder to try and find the next perfect shell.

We'd collect bags of shells. Back then, nobody really worried about "over-shelling" by tourists. Shells were the calling card for Sanibel. We even got plastic shelling bags from our hotel that we filled up with our treasures to take home and study back in Kentucky and remember and plan for our next trip.

We sorted them after one trip. The turkey wings in one bag. The sailor's ears in another. The conchs in yet a third. The other visit, we just dumped them all into a box, and that's where they stayed, on a shelf covered with dust and cobwebs, until today.

Today was the day we were cleaning out the garage. The dumpster had been delivered, and it was time to let them go. I pulled the box of shells out to the patio for one last look. I had called Colleen and Jennifer, and neither one of them wanted any shells for a keepsake. I wasn't so sure. I wanted to see them again. To study them. To remember.

I put a blanket down on the patio and reached for the old Sanibel Island bags. They were crumbling plastic by now after over 30 years in the heat and cold of the garage. Some sand dusted out onto my leg, and I brushed it off, remembering days at the beach when it would get stuck to my skin and scratch when Dad rubbed the suntan lotion on my legs and shoulders. I picked up the biggest conch that we'd ever found. It was always in my mind to pour hot wax into it and make a candle out of it like I'd seen in the gift shops. I saw the tiniest shells down in the bottom of the pile, and I remembered how I loved finding the perfect baby olive or cat's eye.

I started to put a few of these tiny shells off to the side for old times' sake. Then I remembered a small, glass spice bottle that I'd packed up an hour earlier. I got it and began dropping the tiny treasures into it. The whole time, I was picturing two little girls, one tow-headed and sunburnt, one dark haired and tanned, kneeling in the water side by side looking for shells. I found myself singing, "If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I'd like to do..." I couldn't get past that line. I just kept repeating, "If I could save time in a bottle..." over and over in my head because I felt like that's what I was doing.

One of the bags had some sand in the corner of it, so I dumped it into the bottle and shook it down. I kept placing shells in one by one, and when the bottle was full, I put the cork in it and set it aside. Then I picked up the blanket, carried the rest of the shells over to the dumpster and dropped them in. I picked up my spice bottle full of memories and went back to work.