Easter Buddy

​We certainly have seen our share of cute bunnies on the Allegro property here in The Brogue. And we've celebrated many many Easters here, watching the boys and their best friends racing through the woods and across the stream in search of all of those hidden hard-boiled colored eggs. It may actually be in part because they never did quite find all the eggs each year that this year's Allegro Easter excitement involved not bunnies, not chicks, but a different sort of Easter Buddy: a five-and-a-half-foot-long black snake in our yard. Perhaps I shall call him Bonnet.

For about half of the year here, snakes are fairly common visitors. When the boys were little, we used to go outside after supper for our evening "snake hunt," pausing at each decorative wine barrel lining the drive to tip it up and look to see who might be residing underneath. Garter snakes were always the most common ones found there, although there was one memorable catch of the world's grumpiest milk snake, whom we named "Milky Way." We rescued him from the cat and kept him in an aquarium for a little while, from where he would lunge at anyone walking by. 

Our younger son is a particular snake aficionado; he was always the one who would catch whatever we found under those barrels. Several times over the years he's been called down to the winery, where a black snake guarding the front door might be keeping customers out and tasting room staff trapped inside.

Carl, too, is quite fond of snakes, particularly the black rat snakes which do such a great job of keeping down our rodent population around the winery. So when this morning--Easter morning--a black snake was seen peeping out from behind one of our sheds, the adventure was on.

It's a little hard to capture the excitement of watching a 6'4" winemaker swinging around a huge black snake while our yard leopard Artemis was performing surprised aerial acrobatics and I juggled camera lenses. Bonnet was no shy retiring garter snake--he was none to happy about being moved from shed to woods, and he retaliated by sliming Carl quite impressively.

But ahh, Easter in The Brogue. Gotta love country living. Sometimes the best hunts are when nature finds us, just to get a glimpse of our surprised faces.

Happy Easter from Allegro, every bunny!