Old Lady Snapper

The Old Lady digs her nest.                Photo copyright Charley Freiberg

Old Lady Snapper made her annual visit the other day.   

She picks a day, sometimes two or three, usually in June, and makes her way to our house. We never know when she's coming, and sometimes we miss her but we can usually tell when she's been here; she leaves a bit of a mess in her wake. 

When she's not visiting us, she lives in the dark green shady waters that surround our inland island; we see her plodding her way from the depth of the trees that line the waterway, towards our house, through the field. Her shell's about the size of a dinner platter, so she's been coming to visit for much longer than we've lived here - probably decades longer, back when our field was a cow pasture. The field has been taken over by thyme, prolifically spread from an original six-pack of plugs I planted about 30 years ago - there's more thyme than grass, now, and several large patches of heather. But near our front door, there's still a lovely, east-facing sandy patch; and across the driveway, in the cut-out side of a small hillock swathed in lichen and rocks and some struggling cemetery pinks, is another east-facing sandy spot; and Old Lady Snapper has these two places on her mind.

Out of her cool wet domain that smells of ancient rocks and moss and ferny bitter swampiness, Old Lady Snapper pulls herself out of the mud, out of the water, under the trees, and slowly chugs into the sunny field. I imagine that she finds the trek less appealing now that she's traveling through fragrant thyme; but maybe she enjoys the novelty. Maybe, back in her sheltered home at night, she notices the smell of thyme on her legs and dreams of vast Mediterranean  turtle fields, where it's always warm and sunny, never snows and freezes, and a turtle can live in a thick tangle of purple-flowered thyme and bask to her heart's content in the ever-fortunate sun. Hard to know what goes on in the mind of so ancient a creature. Some peoples say we live on the back of a giant, astral turtle; could be she spends the dark nights plotting how to toss us off.

It takes Old Lady a couple of hours to reach her spot, and she might stay for several more hours, digging her egg nest, laying her eggs, covering them over. She really doesn't leave much to see, being surprisingly able to cover her eggs so carefully that the only giveaway that she's been there is a slightly moister soil showing until the sun dries it out, a few small rocks scattered about, and the path of crushed thyme leading from sandy nook to wood's edge. By dusk, she'll head back to the wetlands; most years she'll come back two or three days in a row, returning to the same sandy spot, or trekking further to the far sandy spot across the drive. 

When we notice she's visiting, we keep the dogs and cats in. These furry critters don't seem to want to get too close to the Old Lady, but Abu and Beastreau watch her labors intently  from the window, while Catmandoo, in his Lord of the Universe persona,  benignantly turns his back to her from his window perch. Aroofus Gooptus Barkbender, however, is a particularly dim light and also clumsy as a moose, so we've decided caution is the best course of action. The furry critters, in fact, seem to have a primitive mistrust and fear of Old Lady's stinky self; they keep their distance from the places she's marked for several weeks, even after she's made her final slow journey back to her own domain.

I've never managed to see the Old Lady's eggs hatch; I don't know if I just miss it - it happens in fall, months after she's laid her eggs - or whether they've been eaten or otherwise trashed long before the hatching could take place. I did see a hatchling in Concord one fall day, however, making its too-slow way across a hot sunny parking lot, headed for the river. It had managed to avoid being squashed by car tires and hurrying people during its lonely, unbearably long trek; it had come so far, we took it in the direction it was headed until it was off the tarmac.  Not many hatchlings successfully make the journey back to the Home Place.

A few do. Some summers back, we discovered the husband had inadvertantly run over a baseball-sized snapper when he was mowing in the tall grass under the woodbine-draped trees. We found the body some time later - one leg sadly decapitated, the rest mummified, shell intact. Fascinated, we took it into the house to look at more closely, marveling at the intricate shell, wondering how the body had dried so completely and perfectly. I put it in a basket in the library window; the dogs, eager to get their snoots into anything that could possibly involve fun (food) or adventure (food), took one look and backed rapidly out of the room, then turned tail and ran. The cats, not nearly so interested, only passed by once each, rapidly exiting in an arched-back fluff-furred hissy-fit. Whatever ancient mysteries and powers pertain to snapping turtles clearly remain perfectly intact for weeks or months after one dies, to those who know how to sense them.

We look forward to Old Lady's annual visit, and feel disappointed in those years we miss her. Once every so many years, we'll also be visited by a painted turtle or two, seeking out similar sandy spots in our  field. These ladies come from the marsh that stretches out behind the across-the-road neighbor's house, seeking the same sunny amenities that draw Old Lady into human sight.

Photo copyright Charley Freiberg

I have mixed feelings about Old Lady and her kin, two of whom have taken up residence in one of out-back-neighbor Eddie's ponds this summer. She and her clan are both beautiful and creepy, in a way that makes my primitive mind jump up and take notice. And I notice that I can't see her, or think about her impending visit, without smelling ancient wet rocks, mud and pond vegetation, and a deep ferny muskiness in my mind; I can't keep my mind from wandering into those secret green places for a few moments.  A student of mine, a print-maker, who has since moved to Florida where there are other, equally ancient kinda-creepy critters, once made me a print of Old Lady; now she occupies a corner of my dining room, and consequently a corner of my mind, most days. Even after such long pondering, she remains hard to grasp. I'm not sure where our meeting point may lie. I doubt there are many things we are commonly concerned with.

There is a farmstand/giftshop/greenhouse down in south-westerly NH that has inside it a small running water stream and pool "water feature," wherein live several turtles. They help with greenhouse pest control, and they attract people (who can become pests). I was charmed; I kept going to the back room to look at the turtles; they had no more interest in me than Old Lady does. Clearly the attraction isn't mutual, unlike it is with Buzzy Boy, our resident bully hummingbird who interacts with me regularly, buzzing and dive-bombing my head if I've left the sugar water too long. He hovers and greets us when he first arrives in summer, and hovers and says goodbye when he leaves in the fall - we see each other. But the Old Lady just ignores us.

What I do know, however, is that summer doesn't officially start around here until the turtle log in the swampy place across from Chase Pond is regularly covered with basking turtles. And about that, I believe Old Lady, her kin, and those of us who ponder them, do agree.

Originally printed in The Concord Monitor, July 13, 2016, as “Old Lady and Me.”