Snails Are Cannibals

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

Although May can be windy and cold here in So Cal, rain is seldom on the calendar. Last night's rain wasn't enough to cure the drought, but it washed the dust off, freshened the air, and will help keep the green things alive for a few more days. The morning smells faintly of cottonwood and sycamore, more strongly of sage and anise. The anise aroma is from the natives we called licorice plants when we were vagrant Boy Sprouts.

After the rain, the cool, damp morning brings the snails come out of hiding which gives me the opportunity for genocide. Killing things doesn't generally do much for me, but I do make an exception for laying waste to the snail population. I hate those things with a passion and I take an unseemly, perverse pleasure in crushing the little bastages. I lost track of the death count but I crushed them for fifteen or twenty minutes this morning. That was in between tossing the ball for Beanie Boy to fetch, so there is some time loss there.

I'm sure I killed hundreds of the monsters, all of which are descendants of the snails that hitched a ride home on six-packs of annuals and gallon shrubs purchased at Home Despot and Lowes. No charge. Thankeee. Something that's rarely mentioned is the hitchhiking pests that spread like colds at an elementary school playground. And don't get me started on my infestation of nutsedge. That's a nasty weed that had to be one of the plagues dumped on the Egyptians. You can't kill it and after the nuclear holocaust there will be cockroaches and nutsedge.

Did you know snails are cannibals?