I’m worried about our turtle. That would be Littlefoot, our box turtle who drove me to distraction when he made a break for it two years ago, which I blogged about in “What the Turtle Taught Me." Not long after that incident we created an outdoor turtle enclosure out of a converted raised bed-cum-sandbox, and he’s been pretty happy, I guess, living in the not-so-wide world outside.
On the advice of a "turtle lady" acquaintance we met through the San Diego Turtle and Tortoise Society, we've been letting him hibernate over the winter. He's an efficient digger, and, sure enough, right around his first Halloween outside he burrowed under and stayed there for about five months. He reappeared towards the end of March last spring to spend another summer as he usually does, skulking under a palm frond most of the day and occasionally sunning himself.
He hibernated again this winter, and I have been anxiously awaiting his reappearance. Although he's technically our daughter's pet, I've developed quite a soft spot for the little guy, and my maternal instincts have been kicking in big-time. Before we adopted him I'd always been a cat person, and even though he's a bit of an enigma, I've grown pretty attached to him. The whole turtle-coming-out-of-its-shell metaphor bears more than a passing resemblance to my life after 40, so I see him as a sort of mascot—I've even dreamed about him. And besides, when I see his little leathery head with the beady red eyes poking out from his shell or catch a glimpse of him slowly traversing the enclosure with a deliberate gait, it makes me happy.
I actually did see him once in early March during a late-winter Santa Ana weekend, but since then, nada. As March ticked on into April I kept telling myself that I was going to thoroughly search his enclosure, but I keep putting it off. The truth is that I'm afraid of what I'll find. What if he's dead? Box turtles are supposed to live a long time, and Littlefoot is only 10. If he's dead that might mean that we (meaning I) killed him, and I don't know how I would handle that. Although he seems to subsist pretty well without much interference from me, so it's probably presumptuous to assume that his demise would have much to do with me either—the ultimate conceit?
I was really going to look for him on Sunday, and then on Monday. I thought about it Tuesday morning, but then our daughter discovered her Betta fish dead in his tank. There were tears—from both of us. I was not as attached to the fish, named 'Uli-'uli, as to Littlefoot, but he did have a bit of fishy personality. He preferred the tiny dried worms in his fish food to the flakes, and he sucked them down with gusto before returning to make the rounds of his tank. We buried him in a hole in the ground last night.
So now I'm really hesitant to go searching for Littlefoot. If he's dead I will be very sad, but what if he's alive? Our daughter's advice to me is, "He's a turtle, Mom. He'll be fine," but I can't stop fretting. I keep watering his enclosure but can't bring myself to get down on my hands and knees and root around.
Sigh. Just another opportunity to get comfortable with uncertainty, I suppose. For a cold-blooded reptile not much bigger than my fist he certainly is an exasperating teacher.
