I recently arrived home after a week away to find a brown paper package among the bills and catalogs in my collected mail. I opened it to find a small book—the kind with a textured cover and heavy pages—from a friend.
"The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating" by Elisabeth Tova Bailey follows the author's recuperation from a serious illness and the companionship she finds in a wild snail. Initially, the snail lives in a potted plant on her bedside table, but eventually, her health aide creates a terrarium in which he can roam around, snooze, drink from a tiny puddle, and munch on his meals, which, it turns out, he does rather loudly.
The beauty and grace of Tova Bailey's relationship with the snail is that it transforms her experience of being bedridden. She's physically unable to venture outside or even take a brief walk to her window, but the snail provides a world in which she sees life and change. This small world gives her hope and reassurance that even when she feels she is stuck—which is how illness and recuperation often feel—she continues to change and participate in the world around her, if only in a small way. I haven't finished reading the book yet so I'm not sure how their relationship ends, but the lesson of slowing down and accepting nature's clock is a valuable one.
The friend who sent me the book is my junior high school English teacher, who has been an amazing cheerleader of my writing career. Recently, her brother passed away from cancer, and she told me that toward the end of his life, she would often read "The Sound of a Snail Eating" to him. It was an activity that brought them both comfort during an exceedingly difficult time. She was one of my first writing teachers, and I'm tickled that she is still teaching me.
