We had a snake in our living room last weekend. The kind nightmares are made of: a big, slithery blackish colored serpent that scared Doug out of a sound sleep on the couch. When you live in the country you expect to be surprised by wildlife occasionally. Deer, fox, raccoons, opossum and wild turkeys are regular visitors, and we’ve even had the occasional coyote and black bear, and of course we’ve seen snakes. But….we’ve never had any of these inside our house. Naturally, Doug did the manly thing–he screamed like a school girl for me to help. Now, I’m no herpetologist but I do know poisonous from non-venomous snakes and I’m not alarmed when I run into a big black snake outside or in the barn. In fact, I’m delighted to have black snakes around, because they eat other snakes as well as mice and rats, both of whom are attracted to the grain I feed the horses. Having this knowledge evidently made it clear that I was the designated snake wrangler, tasked with getting rid of our uninvited guest. For this job, I discovered that my long-handled gopher grabber, a set of long handled tongs made to help arthritics pick up objects out of reach, was a better snake handling tool than the broom I originally wielded to try to shove the serpent outside. He liked our house and retreated quickly from the door and the broom. So I grabbed the gopher tongs and firmly gripped him near his head. Unfortunately, he was five feet long and most of him was behind where I had caught him, enough to whip his slim legless body around and free himself. As he slithered rapidly toward the couch, I shoved a garbage can in his path, and he eased right in it,…