My market gardens are infested by slugs and snails this summer. What use they serve, Heaven only knows — but Heaven comes to visit my gardens now and then, and arrived the other day in the person of my grandson, Wyatt, 7.
He disappeared yesterday into the garden, and when I found him to ask his help cutting broccoli, he said, “Grampy P, I can’t! I’m racing snails.”
And there he was, at the business end of the wheelbarrow with (he named them) Slimer, Gumbo, and Turbo, chugging up the sloped end. … “Broken Shell is dead, so he’s out,” Wyatt announced, pointing to an undignified heap at the wheelbarrow bottom.
I went to pick broccoli, suddenly seeing through a child’s eyes.