“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile,
but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”
~Thich Nhat Hanh
Last year I had a garter snake in my lavender bush. I called him Howard, after the movie Howard’s End, because all I ever saw was one end or the other. Anyway, I haven’t seen Howard yet this year, but this pair live next door. They makes Howard look tiny. There’s not a good sense of scale here, but they’re huge for garter snakes, easily three foot each. My neighbor, Dori, tells me even they are small compared to what she ran over in her driveway: a garter snake upward of six feet long. I had no idea they could get that big. In any case, this pair was really pretty – I can’t believe I’m saying that about a snake, but it’s true. Such subtle hues with specks of blue. God’s creatures are truly beautiful, even if they’re the stuff of nightmares.
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