HOW FAST DO SNAILS ACTUALLY TRAVEL? I MEAN, LIKE, WHEN THEY REALLY REALLY HAVE TO?

No. Really. How long must the sliding door have had to have been left open, screen and all, in the middle of a cold spell, in order for a SNAIL to actually make his merry way out of the grass, across the cement porch, up the two cement steps, over the lip of the sliding door thingamajig, inside my house, and up the rosemary plant?!?!

I just can not fathom how this happened?  Or why it's bothering me so.

And did you know they were LOUD? No? Me neither.

But they are. At two o'clock in the morning.  When the TV's stuck on some channel in between the channel you left and the channel you never made it to, and there's no noise in the house at all, and all you can hear is this shhhrrrup, shhhrrrup, shhhrrrup.  And it wakes you out of a dead sleep.  Well, dead-ish. As much as you can be, on a sofa, with a crick in your neck because of the overpropped pillow beneath your head because, of course, you had no intention of falling asleep there. Again. Loser.

And at first, naturally, I thought it was in my head.  Where all weird things reside.  Then, I thought, no, maybe the window. But I'm not gonna look out THERE, in the dark, alone.  But, then, perhaps, it was coming from the fireplace. No. Under the sofa? No.  Behind the giant-ass TV? No, nothing. Then, I pretty much became obsessed. Ob. Sessed. Because it was all I could hear. And it seemed to be growing louder by the minute.  It was all very Tell-Tale Heartish.  Only I hadn't killed anyone and ripped out their snail.  At least not that I could recall; it HAS been a rough couple of years.

So I'm on my hands and knees crawling around the living room, laying my ear to the floorboards, lifting rugs, sniffing for...God knows what.  And that's when I ended up in the plant cemetery.

Well, no, of course it didn't start off that way.  There used to be a live orchid, a live herb garden, a couple of live poinsettias, two live chrysanthemum plants (one gold, one burgundy), and one live green-leafed thing with white blooms.  But, clearly, they've all died now, although their scraggly brown crisps of skeletons remain. Still potted. It's all very morbid.  I'm sure I've mentioned my black thumb before.

And it was there that I saw, with the flashing of the TV light, the silverly slimy glint and glow of the irrefutable snail trail.  And it wasn't a direct route either.  That boy had been making donuts on my indoor/outdoor rug, for crissakes!  And diligently (and, granted, a little psychotically) following the mucous, I tracked that little fucker right to my rosemary plant.  And it's not like he was buried down in the soil either. Oh, no. Not this boy. He had inched his way to the very tip top of the 2-foot-tall plant. There was no place else for him to go.  And I'm almost positive he was about to wave a victory flag before I snatched him off with a suctioning schwap and tossed him back out into the yard.

Bring on the nightmares, baby!
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