Loved that poem, Chip ... no venomous snakes here either, which takes a lot of pressure off when one sees a snake. Years ago we had grass snakes and little "copper bellies" around fairly frequently, now pretty much all I ever see are garter snakes in the garden (I name all of them "Slitherin'", LOL). A few years ago a pretty good-size pine snake came home from the golf course with my husband - for some reason it crawled up into the undercarriage of his car, then we were sitting on the deck and our dogs started freaking out and we saw it crawling out from underneath the car. We thought we could shoo it out of the garage but it went back into the car, so he slowly backed up near the edge of the woods and I don't think it took 30 seconds after he turned the car off for that snake to come out and take off into the trees.
