The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

I lifted the slim volume down from a shelf of new nonfiction books in the library. The title had caught my eye. Perhaps, I’d read a review or seen the title in one of my many emails or in a newsletter. I glanced at the blurbs, one by Maxine Kumin another by Jane Hamilton. Then, I read the bold print: “The Earthly Adventures of a Woman and a Gastropod.” The writer was Elizabeth Tova Bailey, and like me, she lived in Maine. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a fine independent house, had published the book.

I opened the book to the title page: The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating and under the title, a lovely drawing of a snail, its soft body out of its shell, antennae alert. For the next two days I immersed myself in the small world of Elizabeth Tova Bailey and her snail.

When Elizabeth Tova Bailey was thirty-four and traveling in the Alps, she caught a strange virus or perhaps a bacterial infection. Her illness was severe and complications were life threatening. Mostly, she was bedridden. Years and years would pass before she even began to recover.

One day early in Bailey’s illness, a friend who was visiting walked in the woods. She found a snail, dug up a clump of violets, planted them in flower pot and set the snail down under leaves, then carried her gift to Bailey. And so it began, Elizabeth Tova Bailey’s fascination with this snail. Bailey became a careful observer, an ardent researcher, but what attracted me to this book was, not only Bailey’s emotional attachment to this creature, but the way the snail itself gave focus to her diminished life. Reading the book, I learned about snails, their history, their diet, their habits, their sexuality: woodland snails were hermaphrodites. I learned that snails have memory. I learned that no matter how small a person’s world becomes that world enlarges with connection, connection to a woodland snail.

Reading the book, I remembered my own fascination with a woodland snail, not that many years ago. One of the grandkids had arrived carrying a small terrarium. Which one? It couldn’t have come from Colorado so that ruled out Raina and Lilly. Zeke was too young. Nina. Memory flooded back, tooth marks in leaves of lettuce, slices of apple. I hadn’t known that snails had teeth, rows and rows of them. I emailed, Nina, now, twelve. “Nina, do I remember that you once brought a snail here? Was the snail a school pet?”

She emailed back. “Yes, I did have a pet snail named Skeebz after my best friend who moved. I kept it for about a year and then it died.”

As I write, I think about Nina’s brief response. She had a pet snail. She kept it for a year. The snail died. But, she named it after her best friend. So that small creature was for Nina a way of easing loss, a way of keeping her friend present in her mind.

I’m not a person who relaxes easily. I move too fast, try to do too much. Yet, when I would stand at my kitchen counter with Nina that year she was seven and in the second grade, the two of us observing the snail’s slow deliberate movements, I’d find ease in my fingertips, ease in my jaw. How could I have forgotten that time? And how could I have forgotten the pleasure of sharing that moment with Nina?

Reading Nina’s email, I was sorry to learn these years later that Skeebz had died. I wished for a happier ending, release into the wild. That’s what happened to Elizabeth Tova Bailey’s snail, release into the same woods where she had been found. Elizabeth Tova Bailey did, however, keep one of the snail’s many offspring. But Nina assured me that of all the snails given to each second grader that year, Skeebz had lived the longest.

A May Sarton Legacy

I’m an alternative medicine kind of gal, and so yesterday morning, sick with bronchitis, a sore throat that felt as if someone had run the tines of a metal rake down raw flesh, a headache, I drove to the supermarket. I needed lemons, fresh ginger root, and honey to make my soothing, healing tea. Inside the door, I paused as always, to survey the flowers, spring bouquets with dyed carnations, a sprig of freesia, a single sad looking rose. Then, I saw buckets of tulips, pink, yellow, purple, chose purple.

I’ve been reading May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, and I’m sure it was May and her book that prompted me without hesitation to buy those tulips and carry them home. May always had fresh flowers inside, Winter, summer, spring and fall, she describes trips to the post office to pick up the mail, then afterwards, stopping to buy flowers. For her, fresh flowers were a meditation. On Thursday, January 30^th, 1975, Sarton wrote: “And once more I am in a kind of ecstasy at the beauty of light through petals… how each vein is seen in relief, the structure suddenly visible.”

And so this morning, sitting up in bed, after having breakfast, I am sipping from a mug of lemon, ginger and honey tea, looking at a vase of purple tulips on my bedside table. Earlier, I cut the stems, cut away yellow leaves, gave them fresh water. Their color seems brighter as if each blossom has absorbed light. My bed faces wide sliding glass doors, and although today the sky is pearly gray, light here at the edge of sea is luminous. From my bed, I see the deck’s horizontal railing and beyond the deck the ocean, waves rising, curling, breaking. This is my front yard, the foaming sea.

I watch a single flower, the egg shape of the bloom, white at its base, then notice small green veins. The attachment of stem and flower seems fluid, fragile and strong at the same time. I share May Sarton’s love of flowers, her love of the sea. She is a woman I might have met. I moved into her neighborhood, used to run along the road, then up her driveway as far as I dared, hoping to see her out among her daffodils, but Sarton was ill, then, no longer outside in her garden. This morning, I hold her book in my hand, watch the sea, watch my tulip. Musing, I sip my healing lemon, ginger and honey tea.

Wishing the Harp Seal Safe Travels

Late Sunday afternoon, after walking the dogs, I burst into the house, called to Dick, my husband, talking as I climbed the stairs, “You have to put on your jacket. I have something to show you.”

Sitting on the living room couch, Dick looked up from the Sunday paper. He was a tall man with a long face, round trusting eyes. “Now?”

“Now,” I said.

Moving slowly, he folded the paper, then placed it on the low coffee table. “I’ll bet it’s an animal,” he said.

We lived at the end of a dirt road on the coast of Maine, and we loved sharing our animal sightings, the fox and her kits, porcupines, deer, wild turkeys, pheasants, hawks, owls, a rare blanding turtle, and once we’d watching from the deck as a moose swam in the surf past our house.

“I’ll bet it’s an animal,” Dick said, again as he climbed into my car. I didn’t answer. “A moose.”

As we approached a tidal inlet about a mile and a half from the house, I saw that we weren’t alone. A woman had come with two children. The animal control officer’s car was there, along with another car. This stretch of road was on a curve. There was a short metal barrier, a slope that led to the marsh where snow and ice had flattened out.

We were in the middle of a cold spell, and that day the high was twenty-seven. Snow on the sides of the road had hardened to the consistency of cement. Portions of the inlet had frozen. Getting out of the car, Dick pointed to the ducks, mostly mallards. “They aren’t frozen there?”

“Of course not,” I said. “Why would you think that?” My voice was hard, impatient. I wanted him to find that pair of black eyes. “Look a little closer to shore.

I watched as surprise transformed his face. “What is it?” he said.

“A seal,” I said.

“I’ve never seen a seal that looked like that.”

Nor had I. Mostly white, white head, white body with black spots. Yet, it surely was a seal, the shape, the flippers, the wonderful seal face. The animal rested on a peninsula of ice and snow, lifting its head, turning its neck, as curious about us, it seemed, as we were about him.

Talking to the animal control officer, I learned that we were looking at a young male harp seal. He was fine, not injured, not beached, simply resting. The officer had come to put up signs, warning onlookers not to approach the animal. The seal was protected by the Marine Mammals Protection Act of 1972. All of us should have been a hundred feet away. We weren’t. The seal lowered his white head to the ice, still watching with his coal black eyes. His whiskers twitched.

We drove home each inside a bubble of comfortable silence, until finally, Dick said, “I hope he’ll be all right.”

The optimist in me replied, “Of course he will.”

Doing research on the internet, I learned that harp seals had been seen as far south as New Jersey, that this male’s spotted coat would remain until sexual maturity when his harp pattern would form on his back. His head, too, would turn black. Harp seals that did not develop the harp pattern were called spotted harps. Adult harps grew to five or six feet and weighed between three hundred and four hundred pounds. I learned that babies were born on the ice, and loss of sea ice was a potential threat to the seals’ habitat.

Then, I was reminded of something I hadn’t thought about for years and years: the Canadian Seal Hunt. Once I read those words, nightmarish images of bloody ice, dying seals and hunters bludgeoning and skinning seals returned. I’d thought all that had ended, but it hasn’t. The hunt in Canada is described as the largest slaughter of marine animals in the world. The Canadian government subsidizes the hunt. Right now, both the U. S. government and the E. U. ban the importing of seal products; however, the Canadian government is pressuring both the United States and the European Union to lift the ban. In addition, the Canadian government is looking for new markets for seal products, especially in China. A fight I thought was over is not over. So many battles, it seems, need to be fought over and over. I’m thinking of the recent assaults in Congress and in state houses on women’s reproductive rights. I’m thinking of the ongoing battles for gay rights, for a just immigration policy, for health care. Perhaps, it took a young male harp seal, resting briefly on a peninsula of snow in my home town to remind me that our fights for justice and for decency are never won, never over, but ongoing.

The next morning, as I drove past the inlet, I stopped to see the harp seal, but he was gone. Perhaps, he’d left on the last high tide. I wished him safe travels.

Letting Go

Early morning. The ocean looks like a frozen lake, the air so cold that vapor rises from the sea: sea smoke. I am sitting in my window seat, propped on pillows. I’ve been sitting here for days, now, ordered to rest by Dr. K. Rest is not my usual way of being in the world. I’m accustomed to filling the rectangular spaces in my calendar with times and necessary places to be, yoga class, coffee with friends, a movie with Dick, my husband, a hair appointment, another for a bone density test, and those times I don’t mark with ink, I mark invisibly in my mind, write from nine to one, lunch, walk the dogs for an hour, maybe longer, water and fertilize orchids, check the calendar for the weekend, a movie at the library, family coming.

Yet, as I sit in my window seat, all of that has peeled away. I’ve been sick for more than a month, and now blood work has confirmed a clinical diagnosis: Mycoplasma, Atypical pneumonia, Walking pneumonia. That is what has brought me here and given me a gift of time unbounded by the face of clock, analog or digital, marking seconds, minutes, hours, then discarding them like balled up tissues. Here in my window seat, time drifts, past into present, present to past. I’ve read Great House by Nicole Krauss, Nemesis by Philip Roth, finished the second half of A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz, a book I’d started more than a year ago. I’ve day dreamed of family and of friends. I’ve read the daily paper from end to end, all of Harper’s.

This morning, I watched as the sea smoke began to dissipate, drawn skyward by the sun, a white hot orb beating down, turning the snow on the ledge outside my window to crystal. Now, clouds hover at the horizon as higher clouds stretch in the wind. Under them the tide, nearly silent this morning, moves toward land. I wonder at the ocean’s quiet, wonder at the gulls I don’t sea. Perhaps, they’re waiting for slack tide, And so a routine has evolved. Mornings, I am in my window seat, reading, writing, dozing or simply closing my eyes and banishing thought—in the words of Dr. K. “like savasana. That’s what the body needs to heal.” Along, I suppose, with the second round of an anti-biotic he prescribed.

The other day, my friends, Susan and Victoria, arrived bearing a huge pot of chicken soup, that healing elixir, that Gene, Susan’s husband had made. There was also an assortment of veggie chips for munching. I love munching. In the living room, we spoke briefly, but long enough for me to explain my routine, after savasana, that pose of total relaxation, making it one of the most challenging of the asanas, or poses, lunch, then upstairs for a nap. “Ah,” Victoria said, “the discipline of rest.”

Or, I thought, later, of letting go.

Winter Ice

Andrew skates onto the ice at a small rink in a shopping center in suburban Denver. Still the most graceful athlete of my three sons, he scoops up his daughters’ hands, Raina, fourteen, on his left, wearing her pipe cleaner jeans, her mother’s narrow brown wool sweater pulled down over her hips, her fisherman’s cap tilted at a jaunty angle, Lilly, eight, on his right, dressed in her brightly patterned leggings, her pink short sleeved shirt, her jacket unzipped and slipping from her shoulders, blond hair lifting on invisible currents. Two days shy of the winter solstice with afternoon on the wane, the sun shines more brightly here than where I live on the coast of Maine. Andrew and the girls glide past, Raina glancing back over her shoulder, “Hi Grammy.”

I was twelve when my mother bought me my first pair of figure skates, skates that weren’t hand me downs, skates that were finally white with those little ridges at the front of each blade, bought them a size larger than my shoe size, so that I’d have room to grow. I stuffed the toes with balled up newspaper, then skated onto the pond at Taylor Park, in Millburn, New Jersey, and years later, onto a pond in my suburban Boston neighborhood, wearing those same skates the toes packed, again with balled up paper, teaching Richard, Andrew and Douglas to skate, and standing here, at the railing of this rink in Colorado, the depths of memory swirling in time’s vortex, I am no longer that young mother, no longer the twelve year old, no longer the grandmother glowing in her granddaughters' light, I am a child watching from the edge of a pond in Morristown, New Jersey as my mother, head bent, wearing a knitted tam, sits on a bench, lacing her white figure skates, then taking my hand. My skates are double runners, and I can’t wait to graduate to skates that match my mother’s, but until the year I am twelve, I will wear brown skates that come to me from neighbors or cousins.

The skating ponds of my mother’s childhood, of my childhood, my sons’ childhoods have for these granddaughters given way to rinks, large indoor rinks, smaller rinks at ski areas, this rink surrounded by shops, walkways, trees and shrubs. Content, today, to be the observer, I don’t rent skates; I shop with my daughter in law, then later, walk with Raina, the two of us meandering in and out of shops, a bed and bath shop, a crafts shop that sells woolen hats knitted into monster faces, a flower shop where inside thick glass an etching of a tree glows.

As we leave the shop, lights come on, red stars, white Christmas balls suspended in the deepening dark. At the rink Lilly has found a friend, and as the two girls chase one another across the ice, I’m reminded of a chase long ago when my husband, my three sons, and I were vacationing in Davos, Switzerland, taking a day off from skiing to skate. Douglas was in the first grade, playing tag with a boy he met, neither speaking the other’s language, but understanding each other just the same as they followed, touched, laughed, as Lilly and her new friend laughed now, the blades of their skates splintering time, spraying memory like crystals into the cold December night.

So Just What is a Writers' Colony?

For years now I have made my pilgrimage to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the VCCA, an artists’ colony at the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains in rural Virginia. Before I leave, friends wish me well. “Happy Writing,” they say; or, “So you’re off to writers’ camp;” maybe, “Have fun at your workshop;” and the most bold, the most direct, “I don’t understand why you have to go there.”

So just what is a writers’ colony?

The VCCA sits on a hill top surround by fields where cows graze. Out the back gate are country roads, narrow and unlined where the few cars that pass drive fast. There are small houses, where if you turn right, you’ll find mostly African-Americans; turn left and you’ll find white folks. Dogs roam freely. The are woods. On my walk, today I passed a field where, under the bright Virginia sky, goats grazed. Sun shone down. There was a breeze, and birds thought fall had turned to spring. I passed no stores, no strip malls, no baseball fields or tennis courts.

Back on the grounds of the VCCA, I sit in my studio, the corn crib, a free standing building that looks like Hansel’s and Gretel’s cottage, and yes, it was a corn crib with its slanting walls and slanting roof. I sit at desk, my computer in front of me. There is a bookcase, an upholstered chair, a single bed, box spring and mattress on a metal frame. I don’t sleep in that bed. I sleep in a residence hall about a football field or so, down a driveway and across a wide lawn. The bed in the studio is for what Virginia Woolf called her well. When it went dry, she waited until it filled again. So I lie on my studio bed, my well fillling my mind drifting, aimlessly, it seems, but not airmlessly, for my sub-conscious brain is hard at work. Here, the phone does not ring. I don’t collect mail, and the real world is far away.

Around me in studios I cannot see other artists work as I do, writers, painters and composers, all of us toiling long hours in our solitary spaces, coming together for meals, although some choose to eat alone, sharing our work at readings and open studios, although, some choose not to share. They’re not shy. They’re simply not ready.

Because we are here, together, something happens. It is as if invisible seeds fill the air. We feel them them floating, and we plunge deeper into a story or a painting. Perhaps, we try something new, return for dinner estatic: a break through. If this sounds a little woo-woo or new age, think of yourself when you were a child, the way you built whole cities out of sticks or sat mesmerized by a rainbow inside a puddle after rain. This is the artists’ world, cities out of sticks, a rainbow in a puddle. Here, we have the space around the time to squat down, to look, to listen, to fill the well. Here is where art is born, then suckled. We are kindred spirits, kindred souls.

So yes, this place is all of the things you asked about, writers’ camp, workshop, and now you know why I'm here.

For Now

Last night, Dick, my husband and I lifted paintings from their hooks on living room walls and carried them into the dining room. He carried plants. I carried a small leather bound set of Shakespeare, twelve volumes, the leather flaking, the pages thin and trimmed with gold, then placed it carefully on a long Italian limestone serving counter in the dining room. These were my mother-in-law’s volumes. Shakespeare did not live in the house in which I grew up. He lived in my mother-in-law’s house, along with volumes of Dickens, the complete works of George Eliot, a leather bound volume of Keats', Poetical Works, a two volume set, Famous Actors of the Day, Famous Actresses of the Day, copyright L. C. Page and Company, 1899, Boston. In that two volume set, there are lovely photographs of those actors and actresses, Mrs. Fiske, Mrs. Leslie Carter.

I lifted a lovely old wooden tea chest from a shelf, placed on the limestone counter. After his mother died, that was what my husband wanted, this wooden tea chest. The counter is long. It holds throw pillows from my couch, a stone carved walrus that Dick brought back from a trip to the Arctic, a hand built ceramic sculpture that Andrew, my son who is a potter, crafted, an old German beer stein that belonged to my great-great grandfather on my father’s side. There are three figures, two men one woman, all wearing what looks like Tyrolean dress, the men in short jackets, the woman in a ruffled white blouse, white apron. All three wear hats with feathers. There are my orchid plants, pillar candles, a metal sculpture of the discus thrower that belonged my maternal grandmother, a small carved ivory figure that used to sit inside a breakfront in my parents' living room.

This morning when I walked Lucy and Sam, my two standard poodles, I walked in drizzle, thinking I may have a reprieve. Perhaps, the carpenters won't come. Perhaps, I will go to my study. Perhaps, I will hear only the sound of the ocean outside the sliding glass door and inside, only the sound of Sam's breathing. Perhaps, I will drift to that place where I go when I write, a place where the rest of my life falls away. But, there are two black pickups in my driveway, and outside my living room windows, two carpenters have climbed ladders. They are hammering. I am sitting at the dining room table, drinking coffee, trying to write this piece. I’m edgy and distracted. They are prying with the backs of hammers. One tosses a board of gray siding to the ground. They are replacing a large picture window, two side windows. They need to repair flashing, seal the house against leaks. Inside, another carpenter covers the couch with plastic. He covers the rug, the coffee table. Outside, the sound of a drill. Now, voices in the living room. Two carpenters. One uses my phone. I overhear words. “Can’t finish until I have… “ I have lost the essential word. What does he need? Over the years I have learned not meddle. I will wait because I will have no choice. He hangs up. “Always somethin’”

Days later, after the carpenters leave, the painters will come. They will repair what the carpenters have torn apart. They will sand, then repaint around those replaced windows. They will prime and paint raw wood. They will patch the ceiling where water leaked. After the paint dries, Dick and I will carry those volumes, that old tea chest back to the places where—for now—they belong.