Aaron Walters had it all; lived very comfortably in an expansive luxury penthouse atop one of those desirable downtown glitzy condo towers, possessed the right education credentials to get to know influential people who willingly opened those invisi...
Winter came uneventfully but whether or not it passed uneventfully is debatable.
One of those sunny but blustery chilly February days arrived and with it a realization unexpectedly dawned on me Whether or not I wanted, I'd gradually, almost imperceptibly, slipped into a role similar to that of an adopted single father. With this daunting mantle came the impossible to anticipate challenges of new responsibilities that could only be matched with feelings of sheer helplessness. I knew next to nothing about Serpentina, her needs, her thoughts, her likes and dislikes, her wishes, her desires; her age and birthday; everything Tina became more of a puzzle.
My almost total lack of useful knowledge about this small waif and what to provide for her merely compounded my conundrum and so I puzzled, "How much knowledge will ever be sufficient?"
True, some days came when I actually believed I was making some progress, notwithstanding how loosely the word progress might be defined regarding Tina, because I felt like I was talking to a logical thinking and reasoning adult. But then those other days would come along when without warning I'd be bounced back into the penalty box and ignored, left there hopelessly scrambling to figure out the cause of her latest tantrum which would undoubtedly trace its origins back to me.
That frigid February day saw me in the penalty box again because temperamental Tina had sped away and disappeared somewhere inside the house. I had no desire to venture outside so I retreated into my office off the kitchen. The radio was on for no particular reason other than to provide background noise while I alternated between fiddling with spreadsheets of crop-yield stats and surfing the net... and then one of those familiar Sound of Music numbers aired.
In an instant that proverbial one-watt bulb of illumination flickered on in my head and I understood everything. Simply change the name in the title and it becomes, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Serpentina?"
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For that one fleeting moment everything became crystal clear in my mind; no solution exists, her name doesn't fit the music and I have no idea what I'm talking about. A perfect match to go with having no idea what I'm doing.
Anyway, in my futile quest for discovery, at times I probably pestered Tina with too many useless questions, but surprisingly enough, she was usually willing to answer me when her mood was right. Too often for my liking she truly couldn't fill in the blanks because she didn't know. The only easy part was wondering which of her two responses I was most likely to hear next: I don't understand or I don't know.
Maintaining that daily, almost constant fire in the wood stove kept me busy and the kitchen rather hot. Most of the house remained warm enough so that Tina didn't slip into brumation. Of course my preventing her from naturally entering into winter dormancy meant that she continued to require food. This worked well at first, but Tina eventually hunted down and consumed every rodent in the house long before spring arrived.
Fortunately she was intelligent enough to inform me in advance about her looming famine because I hadn't anticipated this scenario at all. The morning following her revelation and a blizzard-like snowstorm notwithstanding, like an idiot I white-knuckle drove into town and purchased some mice from a pet store, but certainly not to keep as pets. Rather than easily solving her food supply issue, my stop-gap solution merely presented another obstacle. I couldn't keep visiting the pet store to buy additional rodents without attracting attention and, naturally, instigating those polite but curiosity-driven questions about why I wanted so many mice.
All the more vexing, Tina wouldn't eat a mouse fresh out of the box, so the real sticking point for me was releasing a live rodent into the house. Doing so seemed like total insanity, especially after all the effort I had expended months earlier in trying to exterminate the hated pests. Then again and out of necessity, that little rodent terminator eventually caught up with the latest rodent on the run and took care of it.
Getting back to brumation: this scholarly term and dormancy subject that I never knew existed I learned about from Googling the internet about snakes. I researched snakes only because they seemed to be the most similar to Tina in both appearance and physiology, but only up to a certain point. I suppose this would be akin to researching monkeys if for some reason no useful information existed for a human being.
