It's been raining a lot lately. Last night it was raining pretty hard, so I took a chair from my office and sat out on the front porch of the building to watch it rain. It was late twilight, creeping into evening. I was tired and being lulled into a hypnogogic state by the rain. I noticed a thin black shadow near my foot that I hadn't remembered seeing before. I shook myself awake and looked closer at it. It seemed to move. Was it a shadow of a tree branch?

The thin black shadow was connected to three feet of sinewy black snake -- it's head was about six inches from my ankle.

I jumped up and put the chair between me and the snake. It slithered backwards -- quite compellingly beautiful, grace in motion -- and disappeared in the huge rain puddle in the flower bed beside the porch.

I don't think it was poisonous -- the head was too small, and the wrong shape, and it was solid black, without the normal identifying markings of poisonous snakes in this region -- but it gave me a fright anyway. I guess it lives under the building, and the rain flooded it out in the open.

Live and let live, I say. Still, I didn't feel like sitting on the porch anymore that night.