WOW! My baby girl snake has returned!
She disappeared on November 11 – 11/11 – a spiritual number if there ever was one! And she was only 4 months old, thinner than a pencil, though longer. Her first night in her grown up terrarium, she somehow slipped away.
All my students and friends took the bedroom and the rest of the house apart several times looking for her. Nothing. Since many of those friends are psychics, they reported conversations with Mia (Missing In Action) reporting her own whereabouts. A dark place with wood. She could hear my footsteps, feel the vibrations. Somewhere in the ductwork, we assumed.
I never connected with her psychically. Just spent the winter missing her, and finding it hard to believe that she could hibernate away the cold time – she just didn’t have the physical size to survive that long with no easy food and water available – and no hot rock to regulate her own body temperature.
I said many times that one warm day in April, I’d know whether she was here or not. I expected she’d suddenly appear. April came and went.
So yesterday, May 11 – 6 months to the day, I’m just realizing – I asked Jen to clean up the sand, put away the water and put the cold air duct back in place on the bedroom floor. We had left a way out of the ductwork for her, with a little habitat all ready.
So, naturally, when I got home this evening from Melody’s and was unloading the car – there was Mia, not much bigger, but with much more color, on the floor downstairs in the little hallway by the stairs – looking like she had just come out of that bedroom.
She was very aggressive, tiny little girl that she is, rattling her tail as though she was a rattlesnake! So I dropped a towel on her, bundled her up, and took her upstairs to her terrarium. Which I had not asked Jen to put away. I turned her hot rock back on, put water in the bowl, thawed 2 pinkies for her dinner, and made everything ship-shape.
She ate one pinkie, took a long long drink of water, ate the other, and is now under her hot rock – a trick my now-gone-from-the-planet corn snake Hekima never did.
Weirdly, I had never been able to find her name. Knew it was supposed to be the Celtic word for Wisdom, as Hekima carried the Swahili word for Wisdom. To complete Mia’s homecoming, I just ordered from amazon.co.uk two English Irish dictionaries – so she’ll have a real name in 6 to 10 business days. Maybe then she’ll stay home! : >