Commander Cream to the Rescue #1

I’ve always been a bit, well, granola. The tomboy in the family, I enjoyed splashing through swamps and fording streams as a little girl. I remember when my mother tried half-heartedly to spark my interest in more feminine activities. At one point she bought me a pink purse. I hated the color pink, but I did find a use for the purse.

For a short time in my childhood, my family home was perched on the edges of suburbia. There was actually a farm within walking distance, and undeveloped land all around us. As I grew older, the landscape changed. The farmland was sold and converted into a park. But there was one area I was convinced would remain undisturbed: the dirt bumps.

To my juvenile eyes, the dirt bumps were not mere heaps of soil, but instead the Rocky Mountains recreated in miniature. My siblings and I were the undisputed rulers of the area, the king and queens of the mountains. After all, there were four of us united under the Cream flag (my baby brother was still, well, a baby and useless in our childish battles). We allowed the rest of the neighborhood children to roam our domain, of course, but everyone acknowledged our sovereignty. My own private kingdom. Sure, it was a field of dirt and bike paths, but at least a quarter of it was mine.

Inevitably, development found our kingdom. I went out to survey my empire one summer morning and found bulldozers flattening the bumps. Fury blossomed in my breast, but the anger of a seven year old holds little sway over developers. The area was fenced off. Our kingdom had been conquered.

What does this have to do with the pink purse? Well, my mother thought that with the dirt bumps gone, she might be able to tempt me back into a more traditional female role. Instead she provided me the means to help save some of my citizens.

Two days after the invasion, my friend Chris raced to my house. Chris was a good friend. He taught me how to catch crawdads and how to climb trees. In turn I taught him how to walk through a cattail swamp without sinking. He had a special place in his heart for snakes. I remember him terrifying my mother one afternoon when he showed up at our house with a four foot bull snake he had caught himself. Bull snakes were a bit beyond my skill, but I was pretty good at catching the little garter snakes that filled our corner of suburbia. On that morning, Chris breathlessly announced that the garter snakes needed our help. With the dirt bumps being flattened, the snakes would surely die. In our childish wisdom, we knew what we had to do. We needed to catch as many snakes as possible and transport them to safety.

That’s where the pink purse came in. In retrospect, I don’t know why we used the purse. Realistically, we could have carried the snakes in any sort of bag. Perhaps it was a form of rebellion against my mother’s reforming efforts. Maybe I just didn’t think about the inappropriateness of transporting snakes in a purse.

There was a swamp nearby where Chris and I often caught snakes. We figured that if there were already snakes there, the former denizens of the dirt bumps could survive there as well. I don’t know how many snakes we carried from the dirt bumps to the swamp in my little pink purse. I do know that we never told anyone. As the bulldozers slowly homogenized our former playground, we secretly toiled at our chosen vocation. My mother did eventually find out that I had been keeping snakes in my purse. I’m afraid that a seven year old is not very good at hiding that kind of thing. In my mind, the sibilant thanks of anthropomorphized snakes made the lecture bearable.

At the end of the summer, Chris and I had saved the world. We were certain that the snakes were happy in their new, safe home. When we wandered through the swamp, we knew that its reptilian inhabitants recognized us. The swamp became our new kingdom. Little did they know, but we declared that the snakes were the guardians of the new state.

We grew up. The crown passed into younger, eager hands. And I eventually did have a purse that served a purpose beyond a snake transporter (But it wasn’t pink). Years later they drained that swamp and built condominiums. I hope that there was a new Chris and a new Commander C. to save the snakes. If there was I wish that I had met them: they could have borrowed my purse.