The Snails
At the French marché in 2013, I bought a small bucket of snails shells. I thought they would look beautiful in the two stone dishes on our patio and in the planters flanking our front door. Our village house went back 400+ years and faced the tiny street that once held livestock. There was barely space for an American-sized car.
I was right. The shells looked beautiful.
"Donna-Lane come here," Rick called the next morning. I finished dressing and went to the door.
Seems the shells weren't empty at all and at least 30 snails were climbing our glass door.
Although I'd eaten snails, like them, my body did not. "Let's take them to the river. Give them a chance at life," I said. We plied them off the glass on the front door and the patio and released them.
What we didn't realize that we missed some and for years we would discover a snail on the patio.
Snails became a joke in our family. Some friends took up the story and would provide us with snail gifts.
2024 was a snail free year, but this past week Rick called me to look at baby snail on the patio. It was not the size of half my baby fingernail. When I was telling our femme de menage the story, she spotted three more.
Our patio is enclosed, so I have no idea where or how they came to our home. What I do know, it is another chapter in the family stories shared around a dinner table or in front of a fire on a cold winter night.
My daughter was three. We were about to drive back from Syracuse where we were visiting friends to Waltham, Massachusetts. I called my housemate to tell her what time approximately to expect us. She asked to speak to Llara.
"I love you, too," Llara said before hanging up.
In the car, Llara chatted about her day care friends, what she and Lynnore did during our visit. Then she switched to reciting nursery rhymes, especially "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" over and over, over and over, over and over and... Suggestions she might like to nap were ignored. She did lower her voice a bit.
I had visions of gagging her.
At the New York-Massachusetts border, when we stopped for lunch and a potty break, I thought she would be quiet for the remainder of the trip. She had eaten saying barely a word or a twinkle.
Once back on the Mass Turnpike, it started. The damned star was twinkling all the way to Waltham, more than two hours.
We pulled up in front of the house. My housemate came out to greet us as I staggered out of the car exhausted by the nursery rhyme on constant replay.
"I did it, I did it," Llara said to my housemate. "Just like you told me to. I kept Mummy awake the whole way."
A couple of decades later Llara and I were on the way to Chamonix, France from where we were then living in Geneva. She had finished university and was staying with me to job hunt.
We were traveling in companionable silence admiring the beauty of the mountains, when Llara started, "Twinkle, twinkle, little..." No longer worried about damaging her little psyche I told her to shut up as we laughed.
At least once every trip we relive that moment even to the point when Llara and my husband were driving to the Toulouse airport in the middle of the night and she began with "twinkle..." He knew the story of the Syracuse-Waltham trip but even better...she totally had accepted him into our family.
Note: As I watch my birth country being destroyed, I find I need the light-hearted parts of my life more and more. It doesn't negate the seriousness of what is happening, but it does increase my coping.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment