By Deanie Francis Mills

When you live on a ranch in the wilds of west Texas, you become accustomed to encountering snakes. Sometimes you come across them in the wild and sometimes you step over them on your front porch. You learn to tell the difference between the poisonous rattlesnake and the harmless (and useful) bull snake. You learn to appreciate the beauty of the coachwhip as it esses across the top of a pond so quick you miss it if you blink. 

On our place, we respect the position that snakes hold in nature and only kill rattlers if and when they actually enter the yard, when they might endanger children or pets. Other snakes we sort of shoo out of the way; after all, bull snakes kill not only field rats but rattlesnakes as well. 

But one summer after my second child left home, I began to wonder if I was under some sort of snake invasion. It started when I opened the laundry room door and almost stepped on a big old bull snake lounging in the doorway. You talk about a blood-curdling scream! My laughing husband escorted him out to the barn, but it didn't stop there. Another, infant bull snake somehow got into our bedroom, and before the summer was out, we had killed more than half a dozen rattlesnakes that kept getting up into the yard. 

"What is going on?" I asked my son, who was home working that summer. "Is it the drought? WHAT?" 

And my son, who is very wise in the ways of nature, said, "Mom, what do you think the snakes are trying to tell you?" 

Now, I'm one-quarter Cherokee, and Native Americans attach mystical significance to animal spirits that display themselves to people. I spend a great deal of time outdoors hiking and (when we still had them) horseback riding. I've learned to respect the lessons we can learn from the animal world. 

So I looked up "snakes" in a book called "Animal-Speak: The Spiritual and Magical Powers of Creatures Great and Small," by Ted Andrews. Writing about the sacredness of the snake, Andrews points out that, since snakes shed their skins, then if snake has chosen to manifest it to you, it means that you are undergoing a process of death and rebirth, a great creative awakening. He suggested that we ask ourselves if we are needing to make a change in our lives but aren't, or if we're trying to force a change too quickly. 

I don't think I could have been going through any MORE changes that summer, between my kids leaving home and big changes in my career. (I'd been forced to change literary agents and scuttle a book I'd worked on for three years, AND start a new project.) 

And I'd been fighting against every single change. I grieved for my kids being gone, I didn't want to change agents, I didn't want to put a book manuscript in the closet unsold. But clearly, the wise snake was teaching me that change is not only inevitable in life, but that we should embrace change when it occurs and see what we may have to learn about ourselves--see what new beginnings we might find in those changes. We may need to redefine ourselves and look for opportunities to grow spiritually and emotionally. 

Over the next few months, I learned to loosen up a bit and look forward to the good that can come from a new life. My husband and I rediscovered the playful side of our love when we had the house to ourselves; I came to see what a good thing a career change can be sometimes; and now I'm working under a new book contract. 

Do I miss my kids? Every day. But whenever I find myself fighting that...I think about the snake, and how, once the old skin is shed, the new one can be even better. And the snakes? Well, they haven't come up in the yard since.