Succineas

The sprinkler system, left unattended for the past six months, occasionally if not mysteriously falls asleep on the job. What it has been doing in my absence, I can’t say. Without any reasonable explanation, (yeah I have replaced the batteries), the LED face disappears and the whole system become dysfunctional. I’ve yet to hear the little jets squirt any water on my Areca Palms and Ti plants. Fortunately, it has rained a couple of days and I have taken the hose to the plants.

I’ve reset the timer while the display had been visible, only to discover the display vanished some time later. A few wraps upside the box yielded no results. This morning, finding a visible readout, I reset the clock, which was never correct after the gismo had its nap, and programmed the watering to being ten minutes later at 9 AM, under my watchful eye. This was a more reasonable hour than 5 AM, when I am either sleeping, experiencing a hot flash or running down Alii Drive.

The system obediently responded to the programming. For ten minutes my little hedge row of palms and ti, and the unrelenting herd of snails showered in the tiny spray that encircles the slab of concrete outside of my lanai.

Yes, herd of snails. I’ve done a little research and I am pretty sure they are not the endangered singing tree snail of Hawaii. I found a half pound of the slugs nested together like snakes in a tomb of an Indiana Jones movie. Okay there was no hissing. When I find one or two I unceremoniously fling them over the fence into the road where the stubby little creatures meet their demise. But on this occasion, I was staring at the equivalent meal-size portion of a Burger King Whopper. Thinking the volume of snail goo would cause an accident, I put them in a bag and threw them in the rubbish, as we call it here in Hawaii.

Are these things edible? I thought about the snails I was bullied into eating in Paris. I was glad no one else wanted to sample my appetizers, for they were so delicious that now whenever I’m in Paris I order them.

It is one thing to say you like a juicy Filet Mignon and quite another to stand in the pasture next to a cow and contemplate the chore of obtaining that piece of flesh to slap on the back yard barbeque. Snails on the plate that came from behind a double swinging door to some French kitchen, are not the same thing as an entangled mass of Snot with Hats plucked from the damp ground.

Photos: my arecas and ti, taken six months apart. Maybe next year I'll have the fence covered.