When I was fourteen, my stepdad sold the house we'd lived in since before my brother was born and moved us across the valley--to a place that only went the way of the dodo (for our family) when he remarried, which was many many years after I left. I loved the old house, it was two floors plus an unfinished basement, with a solarium from which we could watch the storms come in across the valley (until they started aggressively developing the neighborhood) and a huge back yard. If we'd stayed there, I'd have gone to high school with the man who's now my best friend. As it was, we didn't meet until after we'd both graduated.
The place we moved to wasn't a bad house--probably the nicest on our circle, though it looked like the smallest, since only the first floor was above ground; the basement was furnished, and in addition to his bedroom, that's where most of the family activity happened. The living room upstairs was a place to keep the sectional and to play host to the Christmas tree...sometimes. My room was the only one on the front of the house, and since it was ground level, I think my stepdad gave me ingenuity points that I didn't have, because there always seemed to be a lot of concern about whether I was sneaking out of the house and how. I never did.
Anyway, the walkway that lead up to the front door of this new house (which we almost never used) was surrounded on both sides by this weird ivy-like groundcover that didn't require a lot of light to grow--for the best, because there was not a lot of light the way the place was situated. It's so hard to explain in text with no pictures, but the carport was on the left, then there was a roof-to-ground fence, a small strip of this ivy ground cover, a sidewalk leading to the front door, then more of the ivy ground cover between the sidewalk and the house.
It didn't take very long after we moved in for me to realize that walking *anywhere* on the concrete, whether to the sidewalk leading to the front door, or from the basketball hoop in the driveway to the back door, was *not* a good thing to be doing after dark.
You see, after dark, the snails came out.
And it's not that the snails squicked me, because they didn't--I was one of those kids, even at fifteen and sixteen, I was picking them up and messing around with them.
No, the problem wasn't the snails themselves, but the sheer *volume* of snails that would come out at night. In the morning, the concrete was *covered* in that weird silvery goo they left behind, countless snail tracks, criss-crossing the sidewalk. It was absolutely impossible to walk to either door of the house without seeing at least two or three, sometimes more than that.
I lost count of the number of times I stepped on them. After the first couple that I stepped on barefoot, I learned not to go outside without shoes. After the next few, ones I stepped on even though I was trying hard to avoid them, I gave up and stopped trying to avoid them. Amusingly, after that, I didn't step on as many. I got so frustrated by it, though, that I wrote a poem about it for one of my English classes. My teacher was Not Amused.
They always made such a distinctive noise, though, that *pop - squelch* sound that always had me rolling my eyes. "Ew, gross. Stupid snails."
So, what brought this to mind today?
That would be the snail creeping across the asphalt in the parking lot at work...the snail that I very nearly stepped on, but somehow managed to avoid.
Probably just as well. As over-active as my imagination is, especially after something like the Lobster Incident, I'd hate to think what I'd be dreaming about tonight if I'd stepped on the thing. :)
Posted by Liz at February 28, 2005 05:06 AM