Saving Snails

EVERY MORNING when I walk sleepily out onto my front porch with my first cup of coffee, there are several snails making their way across the driveway pavement, leaving their trails behind them, allowing their direction to be extrapolated with a certain degree of accuracy. Long, slimy things, with antlers. We've all seen them. Are they looking for water, or something else? What could compel or impel them to leave the rough, verdant, moist terrain where they are at home, and strike out across a perfectly flat, barren, hard, dry and endless landscape? I suspect that the answer to this is known, or at least speculated upon by scientists, philosophers, owners of front porches. Perhaps massive tomes have been written on the subject, hidden deep in the darkest recesses of research libraries. The one thing I know for sure, however, is that they are doomed, that their decision to leave their comfort zone and venture across a vast wasteland can have only one consequence; death by dehydration. We have all seen their dried, dead husks of bodies flattened against pavement, their trail at an end. Less than a week ago, for the first time in my life, I decided that I for some reason care, and to do something about it, at least on my home turf. I find a couple of dried dead leaves on the ground, and, gently as I can, scoop up snails, and return them to god's green earth, far from the sanitized destruction of nature that human habitat has become. When the leaves start to slide under their bodies as I scoop them up, they always recoil and curl into a ball, and become very small and compressed. I always wonder if I am injuring them. Then I try to place them on the ground several feet from the driveway pavement, to mitigate their chances of ending right back in the same predicament. I lower them down as gently as I can, hoping they can recover from the shock, get their bearings, heal themselves, and go about the business of living their lives...........ENCOURAGE CREATIVE WRITING!