On Their Terms

Today was my gardening class, and we had two special guests: a pair of garden snails transported into the city by a family I love with the plan of moving them permanently into one of the new planters we have set up on the roof. The children were unanimously excited by the snails. They wanted to touch them, but only the shells. They wanted to peer at them very close up and speculate as to how they "slimed around." They completely didn't get my escargot joke at snack time, but that's okay; it wasn't very funny anyway.

For most of our class, the snails waited patiently in their cozy Tupperware container, certainly more patiently than most New Yorkers wait to move into their new digs. Approved wholeheartedly by the co-op board and just in time for the still low financing rates, at about 4:15 they were carried over to the chosen planter, at which the point the carrier, who was supposed to put the snails on an appealing patch of dirt, stomped her foot. "They won't come off," she said. "They don't want to leave the container."

"Let me try," another gardener requested. He, too, could not dislodge the stubborn snails, who were possibly thinking that they should rent instead, in the hope that another six months would provide even more advantageous circumstances. I took the box from the child and tried myself. They were right: The snails, having had their snail universe rocked over and over in the course of a week or so, were not going to give up the ghost. This was their Tupperware now, and they weren't giving it up just because we had planted a few herbs and hydrangeas for them. 

The gardeners were becoming restless, worried, even. Without thinking about what I was saying, I set the lid of the container, which was the part the snails were clinging so desperately to, down on a nice patch of dirt near a healthy-looking clump of cilantro. I hoped it wouldn't taste like soap to the snails. "What are you doing?" one little girl said. They all waited for my response.

"I think they just need to do this on their own time," I said. "I think they will slime off when they're ready." The children, seasoned gardeners now who know all too well how to resist when they're pushed, nodded, all seven of them. This made perfect sense to them. And later, when I thought about it, it did to me too.