Snake!

My wife and I have this friendly game we play called Snake.  Now before you let your mind wander into the gutter about some X-rated use, this is an innocent little hide-and-seek game we play with a finger puppet that just so happens to be a snake.

We’ve been playing this for so long, I can’t even recall who actually started it but it was probably sometime after our granddaughter found it that we began to play.

It started out with either my wife or me placing the snake in an unsuspecting place whereupon the other of us would happen upon it in our every day life.

It first seemed to be associated with coffee.  I seem to recall placing it under a coffee cup where I know my wife goes every day to get some coffee.  Then after that, I seem to have found it either inside our coffee grinder or inside one of the coffee tins we use to store our coffee beans.

After that, the snake appeared in my container of oats where I go every day for one of my breakfast ingredients.

Following on that theme, I hid the snake for my wife to find in with some crackers she eats.

Before long, the snake made it out of the kitchen and into the garage where it appeared in our cars in a discrete, but readily visual location.

These early hiding places were ones where my wife or I would discover the snake on an almost daily basis. Usually as soon as we would uncover the snake, we would hide it for the other to find almost immediately.  And each time we would find it, a smile would cross our face thinking of our partner’s deviousness.

Then the game began to take on a more in-depth challenge, as we would hide it in a location that we didn’t frequent on a regular basis.  And unless we intentionally looked to see if it was missing from our hiding place, we would not necessarily know when we might discover it ourselves.  Now rather than our game of discovery lasting a day or two, it began to last weeks.

The nice thing about this game is that the snake does not jump out at you startling you when you discover it.  It is just a simple plastic finger puppet with no mechanical means of motion on its own. But with the game extending into weeks now, you just never knew when that smile would cross your face thinking of your spouse.

I discovered one of my wife’s best hiding places while she was on a 14-day trip with her sisters. The day came when I needed to shock our pool and there in the bottom of the box was the snake.

I was already missing my wife at that time and when I found our little friend, it brought me close to her even though she was thousands of miles away.  It warmed my heart as I began to explore a good place for her to be surprised upon her return but it seemed like she found it rather quickly once she got back.  And then the snake went missing for an extended time.

I found myself beginning to actively looking for our little hidden friend.  If she again hid it in a place like the box of shock that I might not use for a week or so, it might be a while before I found it.  Then one day when I was going to clip my fingernails, I discovered the little fella inside the clipper case.

I then knew I needed to come up with an extra good hiding place for my wife to discover it.  It took me a while to come up with an ingenious location.  I searched all over the house when I came upon her knitting, the perfect spot.  She had not picked it up in a while so I put the snake over one of the needles and hid him among the completed knitting.

In fact it was not until several weeks later that she found it as we had had several out-of-town houseguests and no time for her to knit.  I just happened to be close by when she went to move her knitting for someone to sit down and heard her exclaim with a laugh, “Oh you sneaky little guy.”

Probably without much time to seek out a new hiding place, she placed it in a more conspicuous location, but one that still I probably walked past several times before noticing it perched on the bookcase in our room.

Hearing my wife find the snake among her knitting told me she was still enjoying the game and so I wanted to find another spot that might take her a while to locate it.  With several trips coming up over the next two months, I had to find a secret spot that she would likely forget about it until that day when she unexpectedly comes across our little plastic friend. And I can only hope that I will be close by to hear the joy in her voice, as we continue to play this fun little game of snake!