I can’t seem to recall a time in my life when I have ever been afraid of a turtle. Spiders terrify me, but never turtles. My sister, on the other hand, never cared much for them. I would pick them up and put them behind my back and when she wasn’t looking I would shove them in her face just to make her scream.
I’m sure she hated me for that, but all I can say for myself is that we were kids.
Yesterday as Timmy and I were heading to my Granny’s for a cook out, he screamed, “Stop the car!” after I dodge a large clump of mud laying in the middle of our road.
“What for?” I said as I was slowing down the car. But it was too late. He was already out of the car and running down the road yelling at me to go turn the car around.
When I finally got back to where he was, there he stood with this enormous snapping turtle in his hands.
I rolled up my windows and locked the door. There was no way in this world I was going to let him put that dinosaur of a turtle in my car.
There he stood yelling at me to open the door and I was yelling right back at him that he was not going to put that in the car. After promising that he wouldn’t, I unlocked the doors.
He opened the door and shoved that big nasty turtle right towards me. All I could hear as I shoved the car in park and jumped out of the car was, “Do you think he’s big enough to keep?”
“NO! Put that down!” I was shouting at him as I moved farther away from the car.
Finally he was able to catch his breath from laughing at me for being silly and said, “I only wanted to know which way he was heading. He’s not big enough to eat yet.”
So I pointed to the right side of the road and waited until the turtle was well out of his reach before getting back in the car.
The boy had lost his mind, and I had received pay back for all those times I had done the same thing to my sister. So to Whitney, I apologize for all those times I shoved baby turtles in your face. I’m still recovering from the shock today!
5-28-09 - Column published in the Citizen Voice & Times
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