Snails in the garden

The first rains have passed, and nature seems to wake up from its summer hibernation. Summer here is long, dry, warm and dull. Everything is scorched by the sun, plants hold on with their last strength. But after the first rain, the earth finally begins to smell of moisture, the air becomes fresh, and suddenly it feels like everything around comes to life.

And during this time, the lemons bloom. The trees stand with green leaves and white flowers that smell so strong it’s hard to simply walk by, you stop and inhale a couple of times. The scentg is pleasant, slightly sweet, kind of citrusy, but little softer.

And with the first rains come the garden snails. During the summer,you couldn’t find them even if you wanted to. But now they appear in whole armies. If you go outside in the evening after the rain, there’s a chance you won’t even manage to take three stepsd without stepping on a snail. They can be both gross and fascinating at the same time. The way they eat is a strange phenomenon altogether.

I noticed how the snails eagerly latch on to the fallen petals of the lemon tree and... I don’t even know what they do with them, lick them or suck the juice out, they probably can’t gnaw them, after all, they don’t have teeth.

You can say whatever you like about snails, that they’re pests, that they damage plants, that there are too many of them. But that’s not true. There is something interesting about them, some kind of calmness. They are in no rush, they move slowly, they live by their own rules. After the rain they crawl out, find food and then disappear again somewhere in the thickets of plants. A simple life, even primitive life, they don’t really need much, and no stress. LOL.

That’s a little sketch from life after the first rains. Sometimes it’s useful to just stop and pay attention to such little things. Life goes on around us by itself, full of interesting things. If only we could learn to notice them instead of giving in to the madness of our pace of life.