Me? I sit on my ass and write or stand in front of a class full of college students and teach. Still hard work, yes, but not the kind of hard work my 61-year-old mother endures. She is a federal meat inspector, and she stands on her feet in cold coolers all day long. I have no room to complain, really.

For me, the hardest part about writing and particularly about writing about my life is the sense that this isn’t important work. If I ached at the end of the day, maybe then it would be important. If I produced something someone could eat or wear, maybe then it would be important. But I create ideas and put them on paper, and right now, the only physical manifestation of my writing can be found in the local newspaper where my column about the writing life and books appears twice monthly. I do not have a printed novel or memoir yet, and so I struggle with my sense that the work I’m doing isn’t worth much. (I really need to work on that sense of entitlement some of my peers seem to have. Where does that come from? I imagine it’s a class-based thing…)

So, my conceit of hard work aside, please bear with me, dear readers, as I labor over the next installment of Pissed. In the meantime, enjoy this essay by an acquaintance of mine:

Workshop Is Not For You (Glimmer Train)

Jeremy is an associate editor for Fiction Writers Review, an online journal about fiction and art of writing. It’s worth a look.

Speaking of work and issues of class, I will be presenting a paper about gender, language and working class students at this summer’s Working Class Studies Association Conference, June 3-6. In particular, I’m interested in how female instructors are perceived in the classroom and how language–nurturing, harsh, profane and academic–plays into those perceptions. (Hat tip: Graffiti in Ivory Towers)

Jesse steps closer and investigates the skin. Tom shows him how its both flexible and brittle at the same time, similar to wax paper that has begun to break down with age. Jesse traces his finger across the black racing stripe that runs vertically on the skin. Tom gestures it in my direction. “Want to touch?” he says. “There’s no snake in it. It’s just skin.”

I flinch and cringe against the wall shaking my head. Tom looks disappointed, and I feel compelled to comfort him. “I’m still in the room,” I say. “That’s a big deal.” He brightens. “I’m going to cure you,” he says. And I don’t really have the heart to tell him that’s unlikely. I nod.

Tom drapes the skin over a piece of plywood that’s leaning against the wall. “Are you leaving that there?” I ask. He sighs, and I think he’s going to lecture me, but instead he says, “I’ll take it out and put it in the van, OK?” He says this tenderly, and I am struck by his ability to maintain patience with me. He steps out onto the front porch and calls back to us, “The view.” He doesn’t have to say anything else. We both nod.

“Are you still going to keep looking?” I ask. I must sound anxious because he comes back to the screen door.

“I’m coming back and finishing up in the basement,” he says. “I won’t leave until I look everywhere in the house.”

Jesse pulls his gloves back on, signaling we need to get back to work. I pick up my contractor bag. Insulation weighs more than I expected. It still surprises me. The contractor bags, when full are nearly four feet tall, and they have all the maneuverability of a small dead child, which is to say none at all. Every so often Jesse says “Tamp it down.” I hate this part, especially now that we’ve seen the snake. It comprises folding the tops of the bag in and pushing the air out of the bag and insulation. My prodigious imagination has conjured up a vision of snakes wrapping around my arms and up onto my face. Tom comes back into the house and goes downstairs. Jesse hefts the shovel again. Our dogs, Pippa and Edgar Allan Poodle II, stand vigil in the other room. I have worried Edgar with my scream, and he can’t seem to settle into a comfortable spot on the floor.

One of the first things our contractor Heath told me was that he hates clean-up on a job site. Having never worked at a job site, I couldn’t really speak to this preference. It seemed to me at the time that clean-up had to be easier than almost any other job that might need doing, and I readily volunteered to do it. I couldn’t pound a nail in straight or cut a board with a miter saw, but I had put myself through college on a combination of housecleaning and modeling for artists. Surely I could clean up the job site and do it well. After one week of clean-up duty, I understood. Buffing an already tidy house to a higher sheen is an entirely different task than hauling out bag after bag of rotting plaster and piss-soaked insulation.

We wear Tyvek suits and heavy-duty respirators when we work with the insulation, but the fibers still worm their way under the suits and into our skin. My eyes itch constantly now, and I have developed a strange rash along my waistline. Whenever we have to handle insulation, and we’ve handled five rooms of it so far, we come home and take a cold shower. The water closes the pores so that when we rub the soapy washcloth over our flesh, the fiberglass doesn’t get ground deeper into our skin. Jesse likes to plunge under the water and get it over with, but I hang back and struggle to go under. It has become our running joke—a symbol of our individual states of mental health. We have always shared the removal labor equally, but now, because we have found a snake buried under the insulation and because I am terrified of snakes, I refuse to stand knee-deep in the stuff and shovel it into bags. My job is to hold the contractor bags open so that Jesse can wrangle heaping shovelfuls into their maw.

I am keeping a close watch on the insulation. For me, the nightmare scenario would be Jesse hefting a scoop up that actually contains a snake, the snake, our snake. And I am certain that it’s still in the insulation. I can feel its presence, which sounds melodramatic, but I know that if there’s a snake to be seen, I am bound to see it. I’ve also read on the Internet that snakes are lazy creatures. Once ensconced in an area with food and shelter, they tend to be unwilling to leave unless forced, and as the days get chillier and the daylight hours fewer, snakes become even more lethargic. It’s mid-September, and I know our snake doesn’t have much impetus to leave. Nearly every single piece of insulation we’ve pulled out so far has been cat or mouse urine-soaked, and mouse turds rain down on us like wedding rice every time we mess with something above our heads. Our all-you-can-swallow mouse buffet is open for business, and our snake has bellied up for seconds and thirds. I hear Tom shout something that’s completely garbled and then the sound of his feet on the basement steps. He comes to the doorway brandishing a silvery piece of plastic.

“A shed,” he says. “From the box sill.”

I lean closer and now I can see the shimmery scales and the tube-like shape. I scream, a shivery treble with a gutteral edge underneath. I am literally convulsed by the fear. I drop the contractor bag, and my arms wrap around my middle. I can feel a heavy downward pressure in my pelvis, and my feet can’t stay connected to the ground. I dance in place, a sort of half-run, half-hopping movement. Tom looks at me with appreciation.

“That’s a great scream,” he says.

When I had called Tom earlier in the day, he had told me he doesn’t often do snake removal, but, he added, he likes it because he gets to see how other people live, to poke around in their space. I can see he’s aching to poke, and I’m happy to let him. I spent the first five and a half years of my life living in Mountain Home, Arkansas. Some people confuse it with Mountain View, a mid-sized city that attracts vacationing retirees and empty nesters. Mountain View offers luscious views and city services. Mountain Home, on the other hand, offers dirt, poverty and a healthy range of poisonous snakes.

When I was three and we lived down in the holler, my mother sat me down in the dirt yard in front of our house, and she went inside to have coffee with her friend Donita Deckard. A little later she heard me calling “Nake, Mama. Nake.” When she ran outside, I was sitting in the dirt, legs splayed out in front of me, and our Siamese cat Tootsie was holding a copperhead at bay. The snake was coiled and striking at the cat, but anyone could see that its real and first target had been me. Donita cut the snake in half with a shovel, and as my mother tells the story, when she gathered me into her shaky arms, I was covered with blood. I don’t remember the incident, but I have always been certain it accounts for my terror of snakes. Lizards and alligators and other reptilian creatures don’t bother me, but a snake of any size or color has the power to make me faint.

I find the flashlight for Tom and explain how the basement works—the two crawlspaces and the deep box sills, and I steal a mask out of our contractor’s box so Tom doesn’t have to breathe in the dust from mouse droppings or plaster. He tells us that we should continue pulling insulation out of the living room crawlspace so that he can determine where the snakes might be entering, and then he marches off toward the basement. He calls out to us, “If we’re lucky, we’ll find it.” I can hear him in the basement, sliding the bags of insulation around and rearranging the stepstool so he can look into high places. Jesse and I return to the job of removing insulation from the living room.

Tom seems disinterested in the bush and its snake. I want him to be very interested in that snake, but it’s unfair to call a man about a snake that lives in the insulation under your living room floor and then expect him to look for a snake that lives outside in a bush. I take a deep breath and lead Tom up the steps and into the house. We’ve owned the house for forty-six days, and I’m past the point of telling people to watch out and to breathe through their mouth. If they can’t smell the cat urine that coats every horizontal and vertical surface four feet and below in the house, then I have decided not to care. I can smell it, and that’s all that matters.

I let Tom step into the dining room ahead of me, and I hear the little intake of breath he makes when he sees the wreck of our house. It doesn’t mean as much when I hear it come from a stranger, but the week before, our good friend Ron had come out to help us rip out ductwork. When he got out of his car, he enthused about the view and the fresh country air and the beautiful drive; but when he came into the house, I saw the light dim in him. I saw the weight of our house settle on him, and although he tried, I knew he was thinking ‘thank god it isn’t me.’ That, I found, depressed me.

“I can smell it,” Tom says, and I have a small burst of affection for him.

“Not everyone can,” I say. I point toward the living room. We have ripped the carpet and subfloors off the joists, and now the inner bowel of the house stands exposed. Fluffy white insulation billows up between the joists over the crawl space, and part of the floor is open to the basement below. The insulation smells sour—different than the acrid pneumonia of the cat piss. “We saw the snake in there.”

Jesse has followed us into the house, and he takes the lead now, pointing out where he tried to chop the snake in half, describing with some animation how long it was and how thick. Tom wobbles over open joists to the spot and steps into the dirt crawl space. He kneels down and sifts through the insulation with his bare hand. After sorting through many handfuls of it, he finally declares that the pieces of the dead snake are not in the insulation.

“Are you sure you killed it?” he asks.

“God, I hope so,” I say, but my comment is mere editorializing, meant to keep the situation lighthearted.

“I don’t know,” Jesse says. “I thought I did, but now I’m not so sure.”

“My mother says ‘where there’s one, there’s two,’” I say. “My mother says that I should expect to open drawers and closets and find snakes in them. My mother says we have a nest and—”

“Your mother,” Jesse says, “does not know what she’s talking about.”

“It’s true,” Tom says. “One doesn’t necessarily signal two, but don’t worry, I’ll check the whole house for you.”

The first thing the snake guy says to me when he gets out of his minivan is “I’ve got a snake with me. Want to touch it?” There’s something about the way he says it that’s insinuating and just a little dirty. I must give him a look because he says “OK. OK. Too soon right?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Too soon.”

We’re standing in front of the 1895 Queen Anne-style Victorian two-story that my husband and I purchased a month and a half before. The house has a smug feel to it, the fish scale siding that nestles against its high peak glinting in the mid-afternoon sun, its many windows blank eyes watching for our next move. It’s a Sunday afternoon, forty-six days after we signed the papers that transferred this house and its six acres into our possession, forty-six days after we discovered that the dwelling we thought we had purchased—a simple but elegant farmhouse tempered by age but lovingly cared for over the years—was, in fact, something entirely different.

My back hurts. A bitter scrum of plaster dust coats my lips. Blood pounds against my skull, and my hands feel swollen, as though the gristle under my skin is straining to break free. The snake guy, on the other hand, appears fully functional. He bounces in place. He talks a mile a minute. He’s easily a full inch shorter than me, and I reflect on how hard he must work to find dates—what with the double whammy of a genetic height challenge and his love of reptiles. I’m being uncharitable, I know, but lately, I find it hard to remain positive about anything. Just the week before, I had sent an email to a former student saying, “I’m in the middle of a shit-storm over here in Madison. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” That’s the closest I can come to describing what’s happening to us.

The snake guy claps his hands and rubs them together. He’s taking in the scenery around the farmhouse—our tall white barn with its lean-to garage, the pile of discarded carpet mounded in front of the garage door, the winding path up to the front porch that has a baby elephant-sized pile of black contractor bags mounded on it, and just down the hillside from the house, the massive pile of splintered floor and trim boards.

“What a place you’ve got,” he says. “I love the view.”

That’s what everyone says when they come to our farm. That’s what we said when we first saw it. That’s what we still say. We talk about the view from the front porch for hours—about how the sun creeps over the ridge and across the valley in the morning, about how the sun blazes down into the tree line in the afternoon burning itself out into pink traces, about how the redtail hawks that live in the forest on the ridge love to play tag in the wind, about how the sun floods the interior of the farmhouse with a delicious glow. The view, we agree, makes up for a lot of disappointment.

“Thanks,” I say. “The view really sold us on the place.”

My husband walks out of the house now and down the path toward us. His hair sticks up mad professor-style, and his respirator dangles around his neck. He pulls a glove off and sticks a hand out toward the snake guy. I introduce them formally—Tom, Jesse, Jesse, Tom.

“How many acres do you have?” Tom asks.

My husband coordinates the numbers in our household, so he starts rattling off the acres and dimensions and other pertinent details about our land. I know some of them by heart—5.97 acres, 720 feet on one side, 920 on the other, $50,000 in unexpected repairs—but there are others that mean nothing to me. The twenty-some contractors I spoke to and rejected in the first bleak days after we realized our mistake, the $8,190 our buyer’s agent earned when we bought the farm, the amount the sellers have offered for remediation. These numbers are pointless, a constriction in my throat, a useless exercise. If I stay focused, if I block out these other numbers, I can make it through each day seamlessly and without pain.

Tom has adopted a patina of fascination for my husband’s sake; but I can see how his eyes are darting around the yard, looking for crannies and other dark hiding places that snakes love. My husband keeps talking about the house and the land, offering up details that only we are interested in, but I love him for his enthusiasm. He loves this land, this house, this barn, this life we are creating here in rural Wisconsin. He believes in it, and since I have trouble with this lately, it’s nice to know that someone still does; but I’m afraid we’re going to lose Tom if we don’t let him hunt down a snake or two.

“Do you want to see the living room now?” I ask, and I walk down the path toward the front door. Tom follows, sidestepping so he can face me while we walk.

“So, you think it’s a bullsnake,” he says. “I’m thinking fox snake. It’s almost always a fox snake around here. Bullsnakes are rare.”

“The neighbor says there’s a big old bullsnake living in the barn,” I say. “He seems to know his snakes.”

Tom gets a dreamy look on his face. “Maybe we’ll see it today,” he says. “If we’re lucky.”

I make a sound that measures in somewhere between agreement and disagreement. We’ve come to the front steps now, and I gesture to the bushes that flank the right side of the porch. “I know there’s a snake living in those bushes. I’ve seen in three times. I think it holes up in that crack there.”

“The porch could be hollow concrete,” Tom says. “He could be living there.”

I reflect on how anything is possible out here in the hinterlands of Dane County. We are a good 30 minutes from the city, and our neighbor has already informed us that the woods above his house rustle with snakes. Of course, possibility is the reason we decided to move to the farm in the first place. We had used up our possibilities in the city. Our yard was too small, our neighbors too close, our lungs too full of carbon monoxide. Our house in the city backed up to a 100-acre nature conservancy, and at night we could hear the coyotes calling to each other; but it still never seemed like enough space. We bought the farm for the raw what-if of rural living, and now we have it—more of it than I need.