Strawberry The Snapping Turtle

I was sick this week. Sick in the bed, not moving, not reading, not watching TV, just sick. Somehow I got to the doctor's office, then fell asleep in the waiting room. Truly. The nurse apologized for waking me. It was all the energy I could muster to get there.

Wednesday night we had a pretty wicked storm. With overhead power lines I'm amazed that we didn't lose power for more than about a minute. We always lose power and when we do we then watch our neighbors across the street slowly power up their generator, while we do our best not to burn our place down with candles. Then sooner or later life is restored and I stop talking about getting a generator.

So, Wednesday afternoon during the storm we lost power briefly but I didn't care. I was in bed, pretty out of it and glad that the kids school is in the basement of a large church. So, they were safe I assumed and they were.

So much rain Wednesday afternoon and then overnight caused a lot of problems around here but the one that affected me most was when I was awoken Thursday morning at 7 by Andy who burst into the room and said "You've got to see this." Then went to get Julia. She and I were both grumpy but I was grumpy on top of feeling awful still. Either way I knew that if Andy was waking me it was going to be good.

We aren't quite sure if it was the craziness of the storm or time of year, but as Andy was walking down the driveway to get the paper he noticed something big and shiny in our yard 'o weeds. Not a wet stick, not a cluster of wet branches. No, a snapping turtle who had apparently somehow made it way up from the lake to our house, oh, about 7 to 9 feet from our front door.

We looked at it, we talked to it, we kept a reasonable distance from it.

As the kids got ready to go to school they would periodically give me updates that it was moving, that it was digging. It seems that it possibly laid eggs in our yard. This idea was from watching it and reading about snappers in our region, that this is the time of year, the proximity from the water is right and the article mentioned that turtles like to lay them high above the lake so that if there are actually hatchlings, they only have to go downhill to make it to the water source. So we might have snapping turtle eggs in our yard.

Brendan liked seeing it and kept a good distance. Both kids were sad to come home and find that it was no longer here.

I was worried that it would try to cross the street and get hit by a car, so long story short, our neighbor across the street ended up picking it up by the tail and walked it down through his yard back to the lake where it happily swam off.

Oh, and Julia named her "Strawberry."