Loving A Dead Turtle

THE DEAD TURTLE had been struck by a car, deliberately, for her body lay at the edge of the pavement. Human vicious idiocy, yet again. She had either barely started across, or had nearly finished crossing, a more horrible thought. She was large, maybe a foot from shell stem to stern,. she had a long tail. My friend called her an "alligator" turtle, and I don't know whether he was B essing. Like Casey stengle used to say: "you could look it up." She had been very pregnant. As many as a dozen walnut sized eggs lay spilled out of her on the wicked expedient pavement, sacrament of vile humanity. I hastened my pace; my jogging companion seemed to understand. How hard is it to drive around a turtle on a lightly traveled country road? How easy to sink to one's lowest self, to become a wanton butcher of sacred life. I started thinking about abortion. I thought of the tiny lost offspring, a vast horde of unborn descendants who would now never live. What would she have named them? Then mind tortured mind, searching for some semblance of solace, went to the ones who had lived, from millions of bygone years to the present, and their success against nature. I thought of nature's imperative that many must die young, that many might live, redundancy of survival. I thought of the beautiful balance of nature, and finally found some comfort.