Fred was part of life for a week or so. When I found it, I just put it amongst the items in my shell, trinket, and neat stuff collection without much of a thought. It was the cylindrical rings of color that caught my eye and I’d never seen one before, so that qualified it as collectable. Whether it would last, become a keeper, and go along in my travels only time would tell. Usually I don’t collect live things, unless I’m going to eat them. I watch people walking their dogs, feeding their cat and caring for their birds. Good for them; I guess they need something to do, something to control, or a something that needs them. I look at those somethings as a restriction that would cramp my style and cleaning up after them with a little blue bag - no, I don’t think so. All the other stones, shells, and even the container they were in caused me no concern or required my time. Then Fred caught my attention a couple weeks after it was part of the collection. It was moving with the intention of escape and for a snail it got from one side to the other of the pot I found in the mud of the Rio Grande rather quickly. I thought maybe it was hungry. I saw it on one of the shiny red seeds I had picked up one day, but I guess that was not meal enough. I’m not sure what snails eat. Little critters in the soil or particulate matter that it filters out of the dirt, maybe? There was plenty of dirt in the pot, but it was from Texas and I’d picked Fred up from a concrete sidewalk in Key West. Maybe he needed a Keys diet, so I collected some leaves from a couple plants, put some sandy soil in the pot from where my camper was parked, and just in case it was looking for more protein, I put a bone fragment left from what the stray cats had eaten. The leaves he wasn’t interested in. It went right by them and climbed the rim of the pot and headed for freedom; then I added the sand. Again it was not slowed as it headed for escape, but the bone….
It hesitated on it for a while, but when I returned there was no little white shell ringed with so many colors. Fred was gone. I’ve looked around where I park the camper at night, but I haven’t seen the striped snail. I think I’d recognize it, too, with all those colors. I’m in Islamorada not Key West and I’ve never seen a little colorful snail like that here. I wonder if it’ll make it, here? Too bad it couldn’t talk, maybe it would’ve requested to be returned to Key West. If it could’ve delayed its escape, I’m going back there in several days, and it could’ve made its break for freedom there. Gee, maybe this is how people get hung up on that pet thing!
Oh yeah, there is another live thing that I know of in the pot. I think it’s akin to the monster plant I found living in a street drain in Deerfield Beach in 1998. It was extremely exotic. I’m sure an invasive specie. I’ve never seen it growing in nature, but my house plants need to be able go it alone for months when I’m meandering to all those wonderful places less visited where it’s warm from January to May in Florida, southern Texas, Arizona, southern Utah where all those nowherelands north of the Grand Canyon are and more. This exotic monster plant sheds its young from its leaves as they mature. Their abscission layer forms and each baby plant falls and takes root where it lands. I’ve found them rooted in my carpet at home and I’ve had to evict them! But they don’t need to be watered except occasionally when I’m home. The one in my pot from the Rio Grande, which may’ve been bought recently in the local convenience store and discarded or lost in a flood or maybe left over from Montezuma’s Days, has the same type of leaf and was growing in a hole in a concrete wall. That’s the hearty qualification my plants need! I’ve also buried seeds I found in the desert and in Key West along with a couple from avocados, that I used to make guacamole. None of them have sprouted yet.
Plants are as close to a pet that I want to get, so whereever Fred escaped to, I wish him well. Hopefully this is close enough to Key West for it to survive. I had spent all the time gathering food it was going to get. I had considered bringing it a friend, a snail from the mangroves growing in the Florida Bay, but I think I’ll just leave them where they are. It would probably have just escaped, too. Had Fred stayed, maybe we would’ve gotten along. It could’ve made friends with the monster plant, since it was from Key West, too. There were no fire plugs for him to sniff and carry the remnants home, it didn’t bark or slink around and rub against your legs leaving a bunch of hair. Fred, it was your choice to make a break for it. I hope it worked. Yeah, I even named it; that’s really close to having a pet!
This was written while sitting in my camper gazing over the Florida Bay at MM 79 on Tea Table Key, Islamorada in the Florida Keys on a chilly January day when the temperature was having a hard time reaching 70 and the breeze was assuring a chilly happy hour, but great sunset.
