Home Made Wild

by | Jul 23, 2026

Cyanotype collage featuring varied fabrics, snake skin, plants, and some chains.

“Maize with Fabric” (2026), Holly Zhou. Courtesy of the artist.

In spring, we count snakes in the garden. The raised beds are built over what used to be an in-ground swimming pool. The walkway that once surrounded the pool is still in place; beneath the concrete slabs, snakes poke their heads out to reach the sun. They camouflage amid stone, dried leaves, and other detritus the winter has left behind, but look closely, and we find one, then another, and another. Most are small, but of the larger ones, we speculate which is the mother. We pull spring weeds from within clusters of dried echinacea stalks and find skins. Having lain there all winter, they come apart in our fingers.

Connor and I are spending the spring and summer at my childhood home, the log house that my father built. No longer lived in year-round, the house has become as wild as its surroundings. The hedges that separate our property from our neighbors’ creep toward the lawn, mourning doves nest on the house’s corner notches, and gray squirrels disturb the window boxes where last season they stored nuts.

I spend the warming days in a swing on the front porch, reading while a house wren, unbothered by my presence, builds its nest. Connor gardens behind the house; he calls me to the back. “Want to see some cool animals?” he asks. We stand on a wrought iron bench that my grandfather, whom I never met, built, which Connor refurbished after finding it in the tall grass behind the house. We peer at the log wall and see three baby snakes watching us from the cracks. The curve of their long bodies synchronizes with the grain as it rounds a knot in the wood, their dark scales and pale bellies matching the gradient of the logs. It is mainly the glint of their dark eyes that gives their hiding spot away, though they do not seem unsettled by our discovery.

They are either common garter snakes or eastern ribbon snakes; it is always difficult for me to be sure. Field guide descriptions that say garter snakes are stockier and ribbon snakes have longer tails and narrower heads don’t help much, especially when the snakes are partially hidden. I don’t imagine my lack of confidence in naming them unsettles them either. They are here, and we are here too, and we look at each other.

With its gaps, cracks, and notches, the log house offers an abundance of places for others to find shelter. The logs, which often exude sap, are rough and still treelike: an invitation to the creatures who live nearby. The snakes’ choice of hiding place softens any boundary between our home and the nearby forest. Together they climb the clematis vine, find refuge in the space between the logs.

Finding snakes in the walls is surprising, but perhaps not unusual. In Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live (2018), ecologist Rob Dunn reminds us that we share our homes with many other creatures, both microscopic and visible, and we always have. Dunn and his colleagues estimate that they have found roughly 200,000 species in homes, including bacteria, fungi, plants, arthropods, and other animals. “In short,” Dunn writes, “homes include hundreds of species that have lived in homes long enough to evolve specific adaptations for indoor dwelling, species that have, whether or not we pay attention to them, been a far more predictable feature of our history than, say, democracy, plumbing, or literature.” Dunn posits that the more wild our homes are, the better off we are: beneficial species may keep more harmful ones at bay; increased biodiversity in our homes may improve our microbial biomes and reduce our susceptibility to allergens; and paying attention to the other species we encounter in our homes increases our sense of wonder and curiosity.

Cyanotype of switchgrass in a glass jar laying on its side.

“Switchgrass in Glass” (2025), Holly Zhou. Courtesy of the artist.

The wildness of my childhood home has always presented opportunities to encounter nonhuman life. When I was young, my bedroom was under the peaked roof of our log house. At the north end of the room, beneath a double window, my mother placed a long pink cushion atop a pair of low dressers. Perched on this window seat, I was part of the forest canopy, floating like the red-tailed hawks that soared above the trees. In summer, I listened to raindrops scattering on the roof as cracks of thunder rattled the house. I swayed with the oaks and maples.
This top-floor bedroom holds for me some of the mystery and wonder of childhood. I remember falling asleep at night and hearing my own eyelashes against the pillow, thinking that the sound I heard was some spirit climbing the stairs to our dark space that also held the outside noises of the forest at night: coyote cacophonies, owl caterwauls, the shrieks of the fox. I remember my father pulling me from sleep to witness all that expanded beyond the immediate natural world I was coming to know: a comet flaming across the horizon; the Big Dipper, Orion, and the Seven Sisters, a constellation that spooked me at my core, as I believed that women had been banished to the distant black sky; a meteor shower on a night so cold I could not navigate my desire to keep staring, neck craned, or to go back into the warmth.
A window to the forest and closeness to its noises meant that both the house and I dwelled in the woods. Even as my parents tried to seal the house, it provided no barrier to creatures wanting to come indoors. Ants, wasps, stink bugs, ladybugs, termites, carpenter bees, cave crickets, spiders, centipedes, mice, and squirrels are among those I have encountered inside. In that top-floor bedroom, I sometimes woke to the pink window seat dotted with the remains of sparkly insect bodies and wings—the brittle, iridescent droppings of little brown bats. My father hung a net under the eaves so that the bats could get out, but not back to their roost. Over the years, they found ways in anyway. Once, my father caught a sleeping bat on a sticky trap; he brought it to the woods and released the tiny wings with baby oil. Another time, my cat pinned a bat to the carpeted floor; we removed the huntress from her prey and escorted the bat outside before (I hope) any damage was done.
Now, on summer evenings, I sit on our front porch and watch for the first bats of the night to appear in the steadily darkening sky above. I watch them fly in sporadic patterns and listen to their audible chirps and clicks. Having lived with them, having seen them so closely, I feel better connected to those active silhouettes in the evening sky, more appreciative of these animals that keep the mosquitoes at bay. Dunn writes, “If we pay attention to it, the biodiversity in and around our homes can help inspire wonder.” I trace my own concern for environmental issues to my proximity to wildlife inside and outside of my house as I grew up.

But closeness is not always comfortable. I realize that wonder may not be the first feeling many have when encountering animals like snakes or bats within the space of their own homes. So many of the creatures that come inside are classified as pests, controlled by extermination, simply unwanted. Like most people would be, I am also invested in finding ways to keep animals from getting inside in the first place, and preservation of the log house requires limiting inadvertent destruction by animals that chew their way through wood, wire, or insulation to simply make their own home.

A window to the forest and closeness to its noises meant that both the house and I dwelled in the woods. Even as my parents tried to seal the house, it provided no barrier to creatures wanting to come indoors.
Yet I can’t deny that encounters with wildlife in and around the home—though sometimes met with squeals, recoils, or strategizing as to how to facilitate a removal—are also thrilling. We are perhaps not often enough given the chance to observe another living creature at such close range. In adulthood, encounters like these offer a chance to return to a semblance of that on-your-knees, face-a-little-too-close spirit of investigation that children partake in when met with something new or something living. When I stand on a bench to bring myself eye to eye with another creature that is alive, hungry, and seeking shelter, I do so out of curiosity about the other beings I live alongside.
Perhaps even more than wonder or curiosity, the feeling that my observations bring forth is one of togetherness. To find other creatures sharing the same space threatens feelings of isolation or singularity. We are not living here alone. In much the same way I am drawn to my childhood home to care for a place I know well, these animals, too, belong. In fact, they know some details of the place even more intimately than I do. A corner of the garden, a crack between the logs, a place to build a nest.
Snakes in the walls, bats under the eaves—to live with uninvited animals can certainly be humbling, but doing so is also a reminder that home is a place that is shared. The house, made wild, is a microcosm of larger ecological communities of which we are also a part. We cannot wall ourselves off from the nonhuman world any more than we can wall ourselves off from our human communities. The house’s permeability to wildness tells us, subtly, of our interdependence. In what other unexplored corners and crevices will I find remnants, will I find skins?
Jenna Gersie

Jenna Gersie

Publab Fellow 2026

Jenna Gersie is a writer, scholar, and editor living in Boulder, Colorado.
Holly Zhou

Holly Zhou

Publab Fellow 2026

Holly Zhou is a writer and mixed-media artist from the California desert, the unceded territory of the Cahuilla and Mojave peoples. Working across video, electronics, sound, software, bookbinding, and collage, Holly’s projects curate experiences mediated by play and a poetics of liberation. Their collaborative installations have been exhibited in places such as the New City Arts Gallery, the Field Projects Gallery, and the Ely Center of Contemporary Art. More of their work can be found at hollyz.cc.