say a girl needs a gun these days on account of them rattlesnakes

I am not afraid of snakes.

I come by this honestly by way of my father. It's common to speak of men learning fundamental identity things from their fathers, but I think as a woman, it goes understated how much we draw from ours. I am getting to the age (ancient) where I can start to sort out the qualities I have harbored and replicated from my parents. From him, I learned charm, friendliness, nonchalance, grit, strength, and contempt. I learned a certain affinity for absence. He taught me how to behave around other men and to start fires with pine knots and to tie on fishing hooks and about all kinds of animals.

Something my father was not so good at was age-appropriate pets. One of my earliest memories was of wrapping a giant black snake around my bare shoulders like a feather boa, the way it bunched up and slid off my bare skin as if oiled. I was little enough that I remember it feeling huge to me, even though now I realize that they don't get very big around here. I remember playing with an electric-colored greensnake like a live wire; a pissy garter snake that struck my 8-year-old hand again and again and left tiny, ineffective pinpricks of blood in my thumb. The first animal I ever killed was a snake that was striking at my beagle puppy in my backyard. (I still feel guilty; it couldn't have been worse than a riled black snake.) I've handled live copperheads. I've had a well-meaning but nearly disastrous childhood friend use a canoe paddle to slap a live, striking copperhead up against my bare legs in an unfortunate effort to brain it.

Anyway, all this is to say that I'm not cleverer or braver than other people, but I've learned early on that snakes are a part of life that can be handled or ignored with more or less indifference much like any environmental factor. I don't love them; I don't fear and abhor them. That's why it's so strange to be dreaming about them for the first time in my life. Not just dreaming about them, but featuring them as an agent of hurt and personal destruction.

I've never had the snake nightmare, because what's the big deal about snakes? When I turned to my trusty bunkmachines, everything was all someone cruel, warning, hidden threat. But like... what if snakes don't really bother you? Is the symbol still the same? Signs mean something or nothing depending on what is needed.

Maybe I'm reading it all wrong. Maybe it's sexual. Mnngh.

In other news, I ran 5 miles today. My breasts feel huge. It's raining outside. I miss my family. I miss sleep.