snake

I didn't think twice about this tiny fellow on the
baby boxwood until I got this letter:



Snakes also known as Garter Snakes
(Thamnophissirtalis) can be dangerous Yes, grass snakes, not rattlesnakes.
Here's why.

A couple in Sweetwater , Texas ,
had a lot of potted plants. During a recent cold spell, the wife was bringing a
lot of them indoors to protect them from a possible freeze.

It turned out
that a little green garden grass snake was hidden in one of the plants. When it
had warmed up, it slithered out and the wife saw it go under the
sofa.

She let out a very loud scream.

The husband (who was taking
a shower) ran out into the living room naked to see what the problem was. She
told him there was a snake under the sofa.

He got down on the floor on
his hands and knees to look for it. About that time the family dog came and
cold-nosed him on the behind. He thought the snake had bitten him, so he
screamed and fell over on the floor.

His wife thought he had had a heart
attack, so she covered him up, told him to lie still and called an
ambulance.

The attendants rushed in, would not listen to his protests,
loaded him on the stretcher, and started carrying him out.

About that
time, the snake came out from under the sofa and the Emergency Medical
Technician saw it and dropped his end of the stretcher. That's when the man
broke his leg and why he is still in the hospital.

The wife still had the
problem of the snake in the house, so she called on a neighbor who volunteered
to capture the snake. He armed himself with a rolled-up newspaper and began
poking under the couch.. Soon he decided it was gone and told the woman, who sat
down on the sofa in relief.

But while relaxing, her hand dangled in
between the cushions, where she felt the snake wriggling around. She screamed
and fainted, the snake rushed back under the sofa.

The neighbor man,
seeing her lying there passed out, tried to use CPR to revive her.

The
neighbor's wife, who had just returned from shopping at the grocery store, saw
her husband's mouth on the woman's mouth and slammed her husband in the back of
the head with a bag of canned goods, knocking him out and cutting his scalp to a
point where it needed stitches.

The noise woke the woman from her dead
faint and she saw her neighbor lying on the floor with his wife bending over
him, so she assumed that the snake had bitten him. She went to the kitchen and
got a small bottle of whiskey, and began pouring it down the man's
throat.

By now, the police had arrived.
Breathe here...

They
saw the unconscious man, smelled the whiskey, and assumed that a drunken fight
had occurred. They were about to arrest them all, when the women tried to
explain how it all happened over a little garden snake!

The police called
an ambulance, which took away the neighbor and his sobbing wife.

Now, the
little snake again crawled out from under the sofa and one of the policemen drew
his gun and fired at it. He missed the snake and hit the leg of the end table.
The table fell over, the lamp on it shattered and, as the bulb broke, it started
a fire in the drapes.

The other policeman tried to beat out the flames,
and fell through the window into the yard on top of the family dog who,
startled, jumped out and raced into the street, where an oncoming car swerved to
avoid it and smashed into the parked police car.

Meanwhile, neighbors saw
the burning drapes and called in the fire department. The firemen had started
raising the fire ladder when they were halfway down the street. The rising
ladder tore out the overhead wires, put out the power, and disconnected the
telephones in a ten-square city block area (but they did get the house fire
out).

Time passed! Both men were discharged from the hospital, the house
was repaired, the dog came home, the police acquired a new car and all was right
with their world.

A while later they were watching TV and the weatherman
announced a cold snap for that night. The wife asked her husband if he thought
they should bring in their plants for the night?


And that's when he
shot her.