"Eeeeeeeek!" An ear-piercing shriek sounded throughout our new house. After living the first nine and a half years of my life in the city, I still wasn't used to living in the middle of Nowhere, West Virginia (At least, that's what it felt like to me). City life was noisy, but it was a different type of noise. Out in the woods I had heard everything from bullfrogs' calls to bats' squeaks to woodpeckers' tapping, but this was an even stranger sound.

My dad, little brother Jacob, and I all ran up the stairs to see what caused the screeching noise - or, rather, who. Our "cool teenage brother" Joey was practically cowering in the corner of the hallway with a vacuum. "What in the world is going on?" I exclaimed.

"What I want to know is 'why are you screaming like a little girl?'" piped in Jacob.
Joey pulls his earbuds from his ears. "I was just vacuuming the hallway and I tried to sweep up a ribbon when it moved!"
"So why did you scream then? Where's the ribbon?" my dad asked, looking around on the floor.
"I was trying to tell you that it's not a ribbon; it's a SNAKE!" Joey yelled.
"Uh-oh!" cried Jacob, hiding behind me. "Where did it go then?"
"I have no idea. I was kinda scared so I wasn't watching where it slithered off to."
My dad started searching the hall from top to bottom while Jacob and I ventured into the bathroom. We looked everywhere when finally, I pulled the bag of clothes from the laundry basket. "Ew! I found it!" I hollered. In the bottom of the basket was a curled up two foot long black snake.
"Stay back; I'll take care of this little fella." Dad instructed us. He took care of him all right! That was the end of that little snake and the end of our laundry basket, but it wasn't the end of the story. I tormented Joey relentlessly in front of his friends about screaming like a little girl, and he always turned red from embarassment.
Unfortunately, this was not our last encounter with snakes. Another time I heard a similar shriek coming from my mom's room. Jacob and I were the only other ones home, so we ran to the rescue. "What's wrong?" we asked at the same time.
"A snake!" my mom yelled at us, pointing at the floor.
I peered at the floor in search of said reptile. "Um...I don't see anything." I said.
"It's right there!" she pointed again at the floor where I finally spotted a worm. "Go get a shovel to kill it with, Jacob!"
"That's just a worm!" Jacob said. He stooped down to look at it. "Never mind; that's definitely a snake." He backed away. A few minutes later he returned with a huge mattock.

"The snake is 6 stinking inches long. That's not going to work." I said. While he ran to get a shovel, my mom continued her frightened stare at the little ringnecked snake (Did I mention she hates snakes?). Finally Jacob came back with a little shovel and killed the snake. After this incident, my brothers and I periodically hid fake snakes around the house to freak my mom out. Eventually she got tired of getting scared, so she found all of them while we were at school one day and threw them out.