Snails and Seizing the Moment

This summer has been a good one for ground snails. They climb up plant stems. They make elegant dust trails on the road. I think some of Lisa's many garden casualties- lovely sproutlings snipped off all in a row- may have fallen to these dijon colored organisms. Hmm dijon... Maybe there's a new culinary and commercial opportunity crawling over every soggy square foot of Matinicus Isle. 

These snails presented me with a reminder of how fleeting childhood is. It has appeared especially swift and merciless this summer, as we're going 90 miles an hour all the time. 

One struggle with our life here is providing kids with structure and healthy activity while also trying to patch 7 or 8 jobs and businesses together to pay bills some way other than with a credit card. Answering the phone, working on fishing equipment, keeping the laundry going, cajoling kids into chores and projects, stopping to run to the airport for store deliveries, explaining that no, you haven't gotten to "it" yet- one of the 3 dozen nagging "its" on the list. Of all those personal chowder ingredients, the kids not getting enough input is the guiltiest. 

So one morning, Ryan and I spent a good 45 minutes making a very fancy paper jet. He had his heart set on something a little more sophisticated than the folded triangle kind of paper airplane. We cut, creased, glued, recut, recreased, reglued and created a snappy orange fighter plane shown in the book which should have been titled- Extraordinary Paper Planes that Won't Look Like the Picture. Or fly. All the same, it was sweet, focused time with Ryan at our kitchen table. Precious time together.

A few days later, I found the plane being dismantled under a forsythia bush, by a half dozen or so snails. Snails- Messengers of the finitude of our lives. 

In other news, all my traps are now in the water. Some spots are looking pretty good. Others are not.