I spent most of my free time as a kid at the Evergreen Washelli cemetery. There weren’t many parks in the Aurora neighborhood in the 1990s.
With our two dogs, Jack and Pirate, my dad, my brother, and I would play tag and hide-and-seek among the blackberry bushes and swampy duck ponds. I loved the dogs, but my dad was really the mammal guy. I adored reptiles. I had anole lizards and turtles. I raised an African tortoise from golf-ball-size to hula-hoop-size. My thing for reptiles is not surprising—they are the John Waters movie of pets.
My favorite activities in the cemetery were picking blackberries and catching garter snakes. The snakes bit hard enough to draw blood, and made a terrible smell in defense when I grabbed them, but their teeth were tiny and venom-less and didn’t scare me one bit. I had a terrarium furnished with sand, driftwood, warm lights, and store-bought crickets and mealworms. It was basically a snake hotel. I knew the snakes loved freedom, so I kept the ones I caught only a month or so.
