While swallowing a bite of sweet potatoes I look up in complete astonishment through the window between the dining hall and the Rose study room.

Snakes slither across the carpet. Deep ruby scales move across tables and wrap like bejeweled scarves around the arms of students.

No. Way.

Slightly choking on steamed broccoli, I quickly scarf down my food and rush to the room next door.

Snakes… At Cornell!

Several Cornell students have snakes as pets. These reptile enthusiasts take care of their pets in their apartments, and they were happy to share their interests in these exotic creatures with me at the Scales & Tales event at Rose.

“He’s safe?” A student holds a five-foot, charcoal snake in his arms.

“Of course he is! Here, you can hold him!” Hesitant, I let the reptile sleep across my lap. He calmly rests, and I relax my shoulders.

“They sneeze.”

“They what?”

“They sneeze!” Snakes, the main characters of so many fictitious fables and supernatural stories, seem completely isolated from all other animals in my mind. However, during Scales & Tails, I learned they exhibit the same characteristics as other animals. I also held a snake for the first time and learned that one student has over ten snakes in his apartment.

Because I attended the event, I realized I had many assumptions about snakes and other common fable characters buried in my thoughts. We write stories about and build imaginative personas from many reptiles. In the future I would like to identify and separate the ideas and assumptions I have about animals stemming from fables from the ones formed from true interactions. Hopefully, this novel perspective will allow me to align my perception with reality and limit how much it is skewed by popular culture.