Like many people, I have a complicated relationship with snakes. Meaning, I harbor no ill will toward them, other than the whole Genesis thing in which they are responsible for the fall of man and the pain of childbirth, but I would also rather them not exist at all, similar to my thoughts of mosquitoes.

Mosquitoes don’t scare me. But snakes do. Which is why, when I descended into my basement recently and encountered a small garden snake, my heart constricted as if I’d just seen a python. Zero at the bone, as Emily Dickinson so memorably wrote. That’s the reaction of most people, I think. But after that initial response, human beings sort into two camps: those of us who want to rescue to the snake, and those who want to kill it.

Killing it would certainly be easier, and I wish I had that constitution. Instead, I got assigned at birth the constitution in which you go get a box and try to convince the snake to sashay into it nicely, and then, when it doesn’t and instead goes UNDER the box, thwarting a happy ending for all involved, you start worrying about what the snake is going to EAT while it lives it in the basement, and you certainly aren’t going to go buy it mice or anything, but you can at least give it a plate with some water, and that’s how you leave things, and are now irrationally scared to go into the basement because THERE’S A SNAKE down there, dammit, which other, saner people would have just killed with a shovel and been done with it.

This isn’t the first snake I’ve seen in the basement. About a year ago, I went there to dump out the bucket into which the dehumidifier drains and found that the bucket was full, not of water, but of snakes.

OK, it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that the bucket was FULL of snakes, but there were maybe 6 or 8 in there, which is 6 or 8 more snakes than I expected to find in the bucket. They, too, were smallish garden snakes, but they were writhing around energetically and clearly quite incensed about being in a bucket.

I did the only logical thing one can do in such a situation, and immediately texted a photo to my kids with the caption BUCKET OF SNAKES! Because, who else but a compulsive animal rescuer would go into their basement and find a BUCKET OF SNAKES? Other people can go their whole lives without something like this happening.

But for those of us who are tormented by animal suffering, stuff like this happens all the time. We can’t go to the grocery store without there being an injured pigeon in the parking lot. We go on vacation in the mountains, and there is a stray cat or four mewing outside the cabin door. Chipmunks call to us from the mouths of cats. The world is teeming with animals in distress, and because we are broken in some unfixable way, no one notices but us, or they notice but genuinely don’t care.

The bucket of snakes went outside because of course it did — I threw a towel over the bucket and released them into the woods a safe distance from my house. There had been torrential rains in the weeks before this happened, and best as I can figure, maybe they were juveniles in a group that were washed into my 1900-era house through a crevice in the stone masonry. That’s the comforting story I tell myself, anyway — that it was a one-time freakish occurrence totally unrelated to something that is truly of nightmares: snake mating balls.

Probably won’t happen again. Probably the new snake went back outside exactly the way he came in. Probably never see him again.

Recently, my oldest son came to stay at the house while I was away. In the interest of full disclosure, when I was a safe distance away, I texted him, “There may or may not be a snake in the basement.” He said he’d have his wife check it out. I raised the kid right.