Read this aloud for maximum pleasure.

SNAKE IN THE HOUSE
By JANICE LYNCH SCHUSTER

I am morbidly afraid of the six-foot long black snake — a rat snake, some call it — that
has taken up residence in my garage and on the deck that wraps around the house. In the garage, he suspended himself from my file cabinet; on the deck, he appears to favor a gutter, the ledge of the roof, the railing. He is not easily startled into retreat, and screaming, sword-fighting children do not drive him from his perch, nor does a barking Westie.
I believe the snake was the likely culprit who ate a nest full of house wrens that I had been admiring and observing for a few weeks. I believe he has returned now because the poor wren has, too. And though she thinks she has created a safe nest for her chicks — high in a lantern that dangles from the awning by my front door, surrounded by glass on all sides, with just the smallest hole through which she delivers food and herself. But the snake is wilier than that. I can picture him, twisted around the gutter, dangling over the awning, stretching his thin snake head into the nest and creating utter havoc.
I am so afraid of approaching the area where the snake lives that I have all-but-abandoned the fuschia and pansies that line the deck, the pots full of lemon thyme and sage, the heliotrope, and more. It is not that I want to see them suffer a parched death, but that I am so paralyzed by the snake’s presence that I cannot act against it.
I have now assembled a collection of toy swords which I keep at several outdoor-leading doors. I grab these when I must leave the house, although I don’t know what I’d do with them if the snake actually came near. Bash myself in the head and faint is my guess. I am like the petrified characters in Harry Potter, overwhelmed by the presence of the Basilisk which lives within the castle walls. Only Harry Potter can understand what the snake has to say—and only Harry dares answer back. Others, upon making eye contact, are simply paralyzed.
And because I am a poet, I have made the snake a metaphor for what has been going on in my house now for years — mostly alcohol abuse among teenagers, with a bit of reefer thrown in for good measure. And though I have heard the whispers and the late-night scurrying, although I have seen the evidence and the bodies, I have been frozen by the Basilisk of substance use and abuse. When I tried to act, I was thwarted: I confiscated cellphones and drivers licenses, weekend privileges and Internet access, all to no avail. I tried to console myself, thinking that it was my imagination, making the snake more fearsome than it really was. I tried to reason that the kids were just being kids, and the temptation they were being offered—alcohol and not an apple—was nearly irresistible, given our culture and the easy availability of fake driver’s licenses.
As I do with the snake on the deck, I’d react: screaming and shouting, flailing my parental tools. And the snake of their abuse remained nonplussed, wrapped around the heart of our house like the real snake, threaded through the lattice of our gate. I talked to other parents, who acknowledged similar troubles in their homes. We tried to dismiss it as a rite of passage, even as we prayed that they not get caught by the police — or by overuse and abuse, by illness and death.
It did not seem to matter how much or how often I confiscated the goods, more always seemed to appear. And it did not seem to matter which bad-influence kids I barred from my house, more were always there to take their place. The drug and alcohol use was just like the big rat snake, living around my deck and in my garage, terrifying me not so much by what it actually did — but by what it might yet do, by the very fact of its presence.
Finally, in April, I decided I could no longer react with fear and disgust. Instead, I had to take the snake on and kill it, I felt, or be killed by it. The snake of abuse was on the verge of killing one of my children — if not killing her, then certainly damaging her for the rest of her life. And, as I had every other time that circumstances or the world threatened the children’s safety and lives, I acted, quickly and decisively. I learned the snake’s awful language, and spoke its terrible tongue.
I insisted that first one child and then another be admitted to a substance-abuse recovery program, a residential program that specializes in treating children, like mine, who are alcoholics and drug addicts. Just writing that is painful and foreign; it is as difficult as speaking in the snake’s tongue. The language of addiction is full of loss — lost opportunities, lost lives, lost potential, lost families, lost time. Now both children are in what is called recovery — they have been clean and sober, one for about eight weeks and the other for scarcely more than two.
But every journey begins with a small step. Now that the snake is no longer living here, whispering for them to come away, perhaps they stand a chance of speaking a new tongue, one in which they value themselves and their lives, one that they are proud to speak, that others hear, that no one fears. May their recovery be like the hawk who circles around my house, always waiting for just the right moment to make off with the snake and be done with it. I am going outside now with my watering can, snake be damned and wrens be songful.