Five days ago, I had the great pleasure – and honor – of reading from my latest book (co-authored with Steve Jones, Weaned Seals and Snowy Summits) at Elliott Bay Book Company.
In the middle of the reading, somebody asked a question: Who was the little girl that became the woman now reading inspiring nature stories to us?
I had an immediate answer: My childhood in nature is referenced in one of these chapters - perhaps the one on spiritual ecology.
Then I proceeded to tell my audience a story about the little-girl-Jennifer who played with snails on the bird of paradise plant in the front yard of my childhood home.
And now, several days after my book reading, I have just run across a file on my computer entitled “Nature as Refuge.” In it I discovered a 2005 version of the snail story that I just recounted at Elliott Bay Books.
Here’s an excerpt from that clumsier 2005 version:
I’d build huts for them: four walls, no ceiling – the perfect refuge with a view to the sky.
As a very little girl I learned that my mother’s tendency to overwater led to an enticingly muddy yard. The bird of paradise bush became a moist haven for snails.
I would carefully reach down into the spiny depths of the plant to gather the snails. Two stubby fingers, one short gentle tug, a pause, and then I could feel the snail release its sticky grip on the spiky growth of the plant. I gingerly put them in the inside-out pocket I’d made of the lower half of my rolled-up T-shirt.
I always collected the snails before beginning to construct the mud huts. I wanted their company and I raced to finish their “houses” before they began to move away. I loved the feel of that cool, sticky mud at the base of the plant.
Those snails were my “pets” and I was eager to see their heads emerge out of their shells. The sensitivity of those protuberances really struck me: without touching them, I could cause them to retract their tentacle just by holding above them my hot skin, a blade of grass, a brunette strand of hair ripped from my head.
If I was patient, I would get to watch them slowly drag their bodies across my hand, leaving that silvery see-through trail. I would stroke the curve of their shells, noting the spiral shape as it wound ever-inward toward the center.
I didn’t care that others told me that I didn’t have to build homes for the snails because they carried their shelter on their backs. I adored the snails. I wanted to provide for them.
Once the snails were placed one per hut, I would sit on my haunches, my knees, or cross-legged. Watching. Waiting. I knew that eventually, no matter how many child-years it seemed to take, those snails would begin to push out one eye, then another, a bit of the tentacle, then both, until the snail was fully extended and mobile.
I see in today’s re-finding of a story, a premature version, how lives spiral and cycle just like the snail shell. I see how stories bend in on themselves in unexpected moments. How the meaning we make curls, swirls, and is re-created as we repeatedly tell (and write) our stories. Always, their essence is intact. Embodied. One gastropod at a time. One book, one chapter, one question, one observation at a time.
Now I live in the land of slugs. I am no less enamored by them as a mid-fifties nature lover than I was as a three-year-old snail homebuilder.
It is not always the pretty, the charismatic, the huge creatures who imprint nature’s significance and teach us what stories really matter, which stories have truly shaped us.
All blog images created & photographed by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted. Please circulate images with photo credit: "©2020 Jennifer J. Wilhoit/TEALarbor stories. All Rights Reserved."
