The Pale Gold Snail

This morning I came out of our local grocery store and spotted something on the right side of my car, at the back. I unlocked my trunk, put my bags of groceries inside, then took a closer look at the object.

At first, I though it was some sort of weird leaf or bud. But when I nudged it with my thumbnail, it moved slightly and I realized it was a snail. It wasn’t the usual kind of snails you see in Florida – the little black devils that slowly work their way through your yard, devastating everything they find edible. This little sucker was a pale gold.

As I drove home, I thought about the esoteric meaning of snails. The obvious stuff is that they carry their homes with them, like turtles; that they move by producing slime (oh yuck); and that they are usually found in gardens, yards, even in the sea, but NOT on cars. By the time I pulled into the garage, I decided that interpreting this like a dream might be more relevant.

In dreams – at least in my dreams- a vehicle is quite often symbolic of the self. We own two cars – both Mazdas. But the one I think of as my car was the one I was driving – a black 2008 Mazda 3 that I had named Synchronicity.  The snail had attached itself to the back right side of the car. The right side of the body symbolizes the left side of the brain, the reasoning, logical side, the yang, the male.

Anyway, I went into the house with the groceries, then went back into the garage with my iPhone and snapped a couple of photos of the snail. Both photos catch all the reflections from sunlight and the yard and nearby trees and it’s difficult to tell what is what. I figured I would take another picture at night.

the snail is that weird lump halfway up the photo

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So as I puzzled over the snail’s appearance on my car, I zipped around doing errands and stuff around the house in preparation for our trip to Minneapolis. One of the things I did was put four eggs in a pot on the stove so that we could have some hard boiled egg snacks when we drove to our daughter’s place in Orlando, the first leg of our journey.  And I promptly forgot about the eggs.

Twenty or thirty minutes later, while working on a chapter in my new novel, I smelled something odd and wondered if Rob had put something on the stove that was now burning. Instead of getting up to look, I went back to my story. Awhile later, I heard Rob shouting, “You gotta see this mess.”

I went out into the kitchen – and this is why Rob is the cook in this family – and my four eggs had exploded  -big time. Egg was everywhere – bits of shells and yolk on the cabinets, the microwave, the electrical outlets, in crevices and nooks, on the wall, the stove. A major mess. I considered taking photos, but this sort of mess was, well, really AWFUL

One facet of the snail’s message became abundantly clear as I started the cleanup: PAY ATTENTION.

Later in the day, I began researching snails. These creatures don’t have the ability to hear; I am 90 percent deaf in my left ear for the range of the human voice, due to a skull fracture when I was five. Yet, with my deaf ear, I can hear dog whistles, which are well above the range for human hearing.

Every snail is an hermaphrodite – it has the reproductive organs of both genders. (I’m not transgender or an hermaphrodite!) Yet, snails can’t fertilize themselves, they have to mate to reproduce. But after mating, both partners are able to deliver a set of eggs. Pretty weird, but okay. I took this to mean that I needed both my right and left brains – yin and yang energy – to complete the novel I’m working on, part of which takes place in a world two hundreds years in the future.  It’s not enough for my right brain to wander around exclaiming wow, wow…I need a left-brain blueprint.

And since I’ve been reading Joe Dispenza’s books, I realized the snail was addressing the process of manifesting desires. Pay attention, move slowly, be self-sufficient, believe in who you are.  Snails usually emerge from their eggs within four weeks, so I’ve got a time frame. One month.

Young snails are born with a shell, but it’s fragile and the first thing they usually consume is the egg from which they emerged – it’s rich in calcium. I take that as a message that perhaps I need more calcium in my diet. This seems unlikely. I love cheese and eat it at every opportunity. But okay, I’ll give more calcium a whirl.

When I went into the garage tonight to take a third picture of the snail, with the door shut and the sun gone so there wouldn’t be any reflection,  the snail wasn’t there. I inspected the car carefully, but no snail.  It had delivered its message and departed for – well, wherever, maybe our yard.

Some years ago, not long after we moved into our current home, a neighbor and I were en route to pick up Megan from middle school. A dragonfly kept pacing us, touching down on the windshield, flying away again, playing tag with us. My neighbor, Maya, a Peruvian woman, said, “Trish, messages are headed your way and they’re good. Very positive.”

“Huh?” I said.

“The dragonfly. It’s lucky. It pertains to communication, your work.”

A few days later, I landed a nice publishing contract for two more Tango Key books that featured psychic and bookstore owner Mira Morales. From then on, my relationship with critters changed significantly. They are always messengers. But we have to decipher the code.

And well, there’s the incident with the exploding eggs…