Some might think there’s no life in the house, but I know otherwise. I’ve made friends with the mighty black snakes who take up winter residence. One has grown from a thin, stringy, mean-looking fellow to a thick band almost six feet long and round as my wrist. He enters the house when the days shorten by climbing the gnarled, vine-covered tree hovering over the back porch. Dropping from a low-leaning branch, he traverses the roof and stretches upward along the wood siding to enter the attic window, triangular snout tap-tapping, seeking entry. Hail has splintered the windowpanes, and he slides over the edge into the attic to hibernate. Sometimes he noses his way through the lime and horse-hair mortar on the central fireplace chimney and drops into the rooms below in search of mice. His compulsion is uncomfortably familiar, though in my case the brown river rat was my prey. Prisoners’ fare. So much time has passed, yet those months in a miserable Union prison camp are as real to me today as then. Famished, I slit my quarry from ear to naked tail, tossed aside the oozing hide, and punctured the pink, shiny body with a stick. Twisting…