Snails

Snails have become a family joke.

A couple of years back we had two empty stone dishes. No colored stones, although we were thinking of getting stones.

At the Saturday marché, I saw a net full of snail shells, which I thought would look good in the stone dishes.

I bought them. We filled he dishes but also the pots outside around our plants to discourage street cats from peeing in them.

"Look," Rick said the next morning. "What a cute snail crawling up the window."

I looked. There it was...and another and another and another and...

Seems the shells I bought were occupied.

I'd eaten snails in the past, loved them, although they hadn't agreed with me. I had bought them like this.

The idea of eating snails was beyond Rick's comprehension. "What will we do with them?"

One by one we gathered them up from the windows, plants, floor. We carried them to the river, which was almost dry and put them on the edge where they had a second chance at life.

That wasn't the end. Over the next few months, we would discover a renegade snail. It became a "Guess what I found..." situations. Even four years later we found one, although we are not sure he was one of the originals. And of course when ever snails were on the menu we would laugh about it.

Thursday nights there are craft merchants opposite the church. There we found two Catalan snails. We hope they are the only snails that will visit.