Vacation in Jamaica, 2010

One morning, just in time to avoid stepping on it, I saw on the veranda outside my bedroom door what looked at first like a pale nut, or a small wooden knob off a child’s toy, but which turned out on closer inspection to be a snail. It just sat there. There was no clue as to where it was going, or where it had been, it might as well have dropped from the sky. I took a shower and brushed my teeth, and when I opened the door again the snail was making its slow way under a table. I watched. Its silvery track vanished on the green veranda floor in the morning heat like the vapor trail evaporating behind a jet in the sky, although the comparison messed with my sense of time and proportion. I didn’t want anyone to step on what I had begun to think of as my snail, but it was headed for safety, and I went across the street to look at the beach. I was glad it was morning. My nights are crowded with worry and fear, the old timor mortis back in action.

I sat on the stone jetty surrounded by the water, wondering if that shade of blue even has a name. Cerulean? Teal? Turquoise? Nothing covers it. Then I ached for two of my children who were going through hard times. Then I thought about hurricanes. Then I wondered if I had to decide between looking at blue or green for eternity, which would I choose? Then I wondered how to paint those clouds. Then my thoughts were of no more consequence than little sticks floating in the water. It was a sweet hour.

I went back to the house and got a cup of the most delicious coffee I’ve ever tasted and I sat on the back porch and a few feet away a large shiny brown cockroach was staggering through the grass, very uncockroach-like, they are ordinarily such lithe creatures. Moments later, it tipped forward headfirst into a tiny declivity, dead as a doornail.

Insecticide, I thought, and looked around for my shoes.

“What’s the life expectancy of a snail?” I asked my friends, and they set to work. Some live for five years, we discovered. That’s a long time to be a snail.

After breakfast, I went back to my room. My bed had been made, my clothes folded, towels hung neatly on the rack, but the snail was gone. I looked for traces, but there were none; I looked under the table, and on the legs of the table. I looked on the sides of the house and the walls of the porch. I examined the sturdy mahogany shutters. Nothing. I wondered if one of the beautiful slow-moving women who keep this place shipshape had swept it up and away. Where does it make its home? I wondered, then realized that it was already in its fragile residence. Which reminded me that with or without a roof over our heads, or a veranda under our feet, so are we.