I think I have to figure out how to take care of a pet snake.

I didn’t ask for this snake. No one asks for a snake. It’s the kind of thing that just happens. For some reason, kids can’t find an animal somewhere and then just come inside and say, “Hey, we saw an animal.”

It all started when my son Daniel walked into the kitchen with a tiny brown snake that he’d found mowing the lawn on Erev Rosh Hashanah. (To be clear, the snake wasn’t mowing the lawn.) He picked it up and brought it into our kitchen. With his bare hands. And someone asked, “Aren’t you afraid that it’s going to bite you?” And he said, “It’s a baby. Babies don’t bite.” And my wife said, “Yes they do.” And my son instantly dropped the snake. Then we had to chase it around the kitchen floor for a bit before it could figure out how warm and safe and well-fed it would be if it lived under our stove. And I’d have to stop cooking barefoot, which was never a great idea in the first place.

So apparently, lesson one that we got in taking care of snakes is that snakes move very fast when you’re trying to grab them. Especially since you’re not only trying to grab them, but you’re also trying to make sure they don’t grab you. Lesson two was that the safest place to hold a snake so that it won’t bite you is as close to the head as possible. That’s a fun spot to grab for in a rush.

So far, we have no real idea what kind of snake it is. We assume it’s a garter snake. We also assume it’s not poisonous, because I don’t think there are any poisonous snakes native to New Jersey. We never hear on the news that someone got bitten by a poisonous snake, although that just might mean it’s so common that the papers don’t care anymore.

We also don’t think that this is the kind of snake that can wrap around you and asphyxiate you, mostly because it’s maybe six inches long. At best, it can cut off circulation to your finger.

My son Heshy is really excited about all this. Daniel has been kind of done with it ever since he found out baby snakes bite. But a bunch of Heshy’s friends have lizards, and he’s been asking for some kind of reptile for a while now, and I didn’t want to say no to this reptile that he found for free, because I’m the one who accidentally killed both of his goldfish that if not for me would have died of starvation about a year earlier than they did. Also, I find that sometimes, as a parent, instead of being the bad guy with these things, the idea is to just take the pet in until it dies, and then put it on the kids.

“No, I will not get you another reptile. Not after what happened with the snake.”

So we brought it in. But the main reason my wife and I didn’t want to allow it in was that every time my kids find a pet, it’s generally our job to look up how to feed it. We don’t have time for this on Erev Yom Tov; we have to figure out how to feed us. Can the snake wait a few days?

And it’s not just food with this thing. We also have to figure out how to store it in some kind of container that has holes for it to breathe, but not big enough holes for it to slither out. That is a very small margin there, considering how tiny this snake is.

So right now we’re keeping it in a drawer. Not an actual drawer. A semi-opaque drawer that we’d kept when the nightstand it was a part of fell apart. The kids lined the bottom of the drawer with dirt and branches, a bowl of water, a toilet paper tube, a small length of pipe, and for some reason two plastic forks. And on top of the drawer, we have an old window screen that is significantly larger than the drawer. We’re pretty sure the snake can’t lift the screen, unless it figures out how to prop up the forks. And anyway, it basically always hangs out in the pipe.

We think.

To be honest, I spend a lot of time these days worrying about where the snake is.

See, that’s a huge difference between owning snakes and owning fish. With fish, every time you glance over at the bowl, you see the fish. With the snake, we spend a lot of time hunched over the drawer and trying to figure out where it is, usually in a slight panic. This thing lives on the dirt, and sometimes under the dirt, and it’s the same color as everything in its habitat except the fork. So we often find ourselves taking off the screen and raking at the dirt with the fork to make sure the snake is still in there. Maybe that’s its strategy.

Because that’s the other thing about fish. Even if you momentarily don’t see your fish, you’re not suddenly afraid that the fish are going to escape their bowl and come after you. Also, the snake would just slither up quietly behind you. You wouldn’t even hear it coming. Whereas with the fish, you’d first hear a “Flop… Flop… Flop…” coming toward you.

But for now, we’re doing pretty well, in that so far, it’s only escaped once. That we know of. And through all of Yom Tov, I still haven’t gotten a chance to look up how to take care of this thing. I have to keep checking if we still have it.

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He also has six books out and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].