A few days ago, I asked what you would do if you found a rattlesnake on your patio in Color Country as I did recently.

There’s a lot left out of that. First, I only have my wife and myself to worry about. We don’t have pets or children who might also be at risk.

But I think there is another principal here and that’s one about sharing. I consider the rattlesnake to be my neighbor and I think good neighbors should go out of their way to get along. So my solution was to just wait for a while. Mr. McRattle went on his way and we have our patio back again now.

There are limits, of course. We don’t invite termite colonies to live in our house. And we make sure the chipmunks can’t get into the walls too. But we live here, at least in part, because it’s the kind of place where you can actually find a rattlesnake in the wild. If we started changing it into a suburb … well … that’s where we used to live and we didn’t like it nearly as much.

If I did have a better reason for not wanting a rattlesnake on my patio … like a pet or a child who also needed to share the patio … I would have found a nice looong stick and gently encouraged Mr. McRattle to move on a little sooner than he might have otherwise. I’ve found that they respond well to a little gentle encouragement. Like I said in my first post … they’re very polite.