Garden Snake
My friend Sue owns a small property in rural Victoria, Australia; she is a fairly easy-going sort of person, who accepts odd situations with a certain amount of style.
This was abundantly demonstrated when a rather large brown snake took up residence in the garden at the front of her house.
Apparently she, like most of us, had a fear of snakes. Rather than just accepting this perfectly normal (sensible?) fear Sue, being very "New Age" in her beliefs, asked the Universe for help in dealing with it.
Shortly thereafter the aforementioned brown snake took up residence. It would spend much of it's time sunning itself in the garden bed and, when startled, would go down a very small (presumably vacant!) hole in the bed, which was hidden beside a plaque that sat in the garden.
The garden bed in question runs along the front of the house, and you walk beside it on your way to and from the front door.
Although Sue, with her beliefs, was reasonably comfortable walking backwards and forwards beside this snake, particularly when it was sunning itself a couple of feet from where you had to walk, most people were a little less .... confident? .... about the situation. [In fact there were people who simply could not bring themselves to go to the front door of the house.]
However, it is perhaps an aspect of human nature - the ability to come to terms with even the most bizarre of situations - that meant that most of us eventually attained a certain degree of acceptance, to a greater or lesser extent, and were able to walk past the snake - albeit, at times, a little more quickly than at our normal gait!
Eventually the snake decided to move on and, for the most part, things settled down.
Later on there was another snake event, although of a somewhat different nature.
Sue and I were working down past the dam at her place, and I was cutting grass with a whipper-snipper.
Sue, who tends to be very single-minded in her attack on plants that she decides are unwanted, was digging out some weeds with a mattock.
Just after she had swung the mattock at some weeds near her feet she noticed something black lying near where she was working, but the passing notion that she "... didn't remember there being any hose there ...", was rapidly replaced with shock when the other end of the "hose" reared up hissing at her, and revealed itself to be a very angry black snake.
The snake struck at her - of course, were I the snake, and someone swung a mattock "at" me, I would probably have reacted in a similar fashion! - and Sue ran over to me, very upset and shaken, to tell me what had happened.
We then went back to see if the snake was still there, but it had apparently exited, stage right, as Sue had exited, stage left.
I suppose the moral to the story is that, although you can accept even the most bizarre of situations, when a snake gets annoyed with you ..... discretion is definitely the better part of valour!