Life with the snails (June 6)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
After the recent rain, the snails decided to hold their convention at our house. Mrs. Doud was almost ready to call the cops. “Look!” she said. “One of them has crawled up on the kitchen window.”
She is the gardener in the house, and snails are her mortal enemies. She likes to plant peppers, the same kind snails love, and as soon as the plants come shooting out of the ground, word goes out in the snail newspaper and on the snail internet that dinner is served.
Pretty soon, the tender little pepper plant leaves disappear, and all that is left of Mrs. Doud’s gardening efforts are little trails of slime heading deep into their flower bed hideouts.
She often suggests that I stomp on the snails as I go out of the house in the morning heading for work, and I mumble something like, “uh … okay,” but between you and me, the snails are safe. I am just not a snail stomper.
Once in a while, when I am putting the garbage cans out, I inadvertently will step on a snail, and it is never a happy experience.
First is the sound a snail makes when it is stomped. It’s a crunch, somewhere between a walnut being cracked and a grape being squished. It makes me shudder. I am like Judge Sotomayor. I have too much empathy. Although I have never heard a snail scream when stepped on, I imagine it is not pleasant for them.
Nor is it pleasant for me. Once the snail is stomped, my ordeal isn’t over. The snail leaves part of itself on the sidewalk, and part of itself on the bottom of my shoe. Its last thought probably is, “Take that, stomper.”
Since there are no snail undertakers, it falls to me to clean the sidewalk and the bottom of my shoe, usually in the dark, because that’s when I take the garbage out. Uff da.
Come on, snails, why can’t we just all be friends.
