Snails

Our family likes to get outside, and we on some days go quite a long way from home. Sometimes though, all we need is our own back garden, our patch of the earth we call home, an environment teeming with life and hidden treasures waiting to reveal themselves to us, just here and now.

So, we open the back door and go out into the blue morning air. My son races ahead to rediscover what he sees each day and I take a moment, to pause, to breathe and contemplate that which I could never have guessed before I was a  mother,  that this sense of being home in my own space was the kind of feeling I was longing for.  On his way, my son’s senses discover sage, rosemary and mint, the texture of the leaves, the feeling of chlorophyll in action ~ the sequence isn’t important; he just likes touching the herbs and smelling his fingers. 

Down the garden path we go, with the fire of the sun above us. This is a lucky day and our washing dances in the breeze too. We have been known to walk out into the blue heart of a rain shower, but luckily not today.  

Glancing across the garden fences I see my neighbour’s washing flying too and I am reminded that there are many of us walking out under the sun’s ancient flame, to hang our clothes to dry and to discover what our children can show us in the vicinity of our immediate landscape

With my daughter riding on my back, I follow my son’s trail, down to the garden shed, where we need to discover some of tools to help us today. We need to cut our grass as it resembles a meadow, although I am not always sure why this is a problem as the insects seem to like it. We take out the lawnmower and my child, desperate to have a go but unable to do so races back into the house and returns with a wheeled toy horse who will be his lawn mower. 

Back and forth, back and forth we go, moving the bird table, rediscovering some toys we thought we lost long ago that have be lying in wait, lurking in our long grass. Muffin the horse makes light work of the job and soon our noses are filled with the wonderfully green smell of summertime; freshly cut grass. 

We pause before doing the edges and my son is attracted by something. He has found a snail. Marvelling in the wonder of seeing a being who carries his home around with him, the snail, small on a small hand is brought for inspection. We consider snails, where they might live if they can move their house wherever they go, and, where we think this one is going. It seems purposeful, so we decide to release it back to the ground and to monitor progress.  

Our snail is on a mission, it slides with surprising speed up past the irises and the primroses I was given from a family garden, on to where the geraniums have gone wild in a way that has made bees fall in love with the space this year. Watching and following we find our place in the garden, our balance and sense of relationship to all the living beings; we are no longer visitors, we are a part of the landscape. At a snail’s pace we find that our snail’s wish is to leave our garden and climb the wooden mountains that are our neighbour’s fence; the boundaries that keep us separate in our own private parts of suburbia. 

My son talks with excitement about what the snail might be doing and then, on his own trajectory wanders on to other things too.

My daughter and I have retraced our path to the back door, where our journey for the day takes us back inside the house. The wind is in her house of clouds and white banners above move with our clothes on the line below; there’s no hint of rain, somewhere in the garden my son plays and the snail moves on ~ all is well.