Gathering Snails

Once upon a childhood I lived in a house like this.  It wasn't trendy or cultured when I was a kid.  It housing for poor students who had families they couldn't drag into a dorm with them. The houses leaned.  There were gaps between the walls and the floor that a man could put his hand in.  Great hunting slugs would ooze through at night and leave their shiny trails behind for us to puzzle at in the morning.  Despite this, and the rough part of town it was in (every car on the street the year we lived there was either stolen or damaged), I loved living there.  A small child's world is equally small.  My concept of this place extended up to the end of the street where there was something semi-industrial. Concrete and hot light that flooded against the hard walls.  Grass grew in the crevases and we'd collect this for our pets to eat.  As an adult I know at the end of this road lay a busy major attery that funnels traffic into the heart of the city, and back out to the now trendy inner districts.  As a child I don't remember that at all.  Just that my world ended at that building near where the grass grew.
At the other end I recall a smaller house across the road, and a green space that was somewhere behind our set of terraces houses.  I remember the neighbour.  I remember playing in the small strip of garden in the front.  Durring the damper months, when the weeds and plants would try to thrive I would gather snails.  I would find an empty bottle - an empty 2L lemonade bottle probably - and would drop the snails through the hole into the impromptu terrarium of death below.   My memory paints these bottles of snails as being at least a third full.  However memory can be a deceptive thing.  I collected them, I think, in some warped attempt to observe them.

I'm sure my parents were quite happy that the snails would not be munching on the plants, and I was happy to be occupied in gathering up the snails to keep for further study.  The snails, I suspect, were not quite so enamoured with the arrangement.  I'm certain that each snail observatory eventually found its way to the garbage bin as the poor creatures perished.

It is from this twisted tale that the blog takes its name.  There is a season for everything. A time to live and a time to die.  A time to gather snails and a time to let the snails go.

I could look for a deeper metaphor in the tale - how I don't wish to live my life trapped in a small world, never able to go far.  How I don't wish to die always wondering what is at the end of the street past the building where the grass grows from the cracks in the concrete.
Perhaps those things are true, but that's nothing to do with the name of this blog.

Gathering Snails  - it's about finding the things in life that I'm curious about, and not being too scared to experience them.