A Slow and Meandering Story

In which we try but fail and decide to keep writing

The following is the draft I submitted in the spring to a personal essay contest. I just moments ago received the email telling me “Thank you for submitting, but … even though you weren’t selected for publication, please consider submitting next year…”

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed. After all, I am losing out on the $1,000 grand prize and endless fame. But truly, honestly, my first thought — before making a mental grumble about the most-certainly-subpar writing of the winner — was YAY! I can publish it to my substack now.

For half a second, I thought to submit to another journal or contest — I’m sure I saw something suitable — but that would mean combing through my bookmarks and I just haven’t the constitution for that. Laziness wins out. You get the essay.

Here it is.

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The Secret Snail Forest

I must not reveal my location because of the snails.

At first, you don’t see them, but then suddenly, you realize they are everywhere and become gingerly cautious of where you step. I squat down on my haunches and dig my fingers into the humid soil, scooping handfuls of it into a metal bucket. There’s a garden in my future, and I am collecting the rich soil to start my seedlings in. A sound overhead, and I look up. Above the canopy, a bird glides by, its wings beating a slow swooshing heartbeat.

The village where I now live with my husband and daughter is nestled among the gently rolling hills, green fields, and silent forests of the Hungarian countryside. It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. We have been awash in tree blossoms and bird song for a week now. Spring is mercifully, swiftly on its way.

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Our neighbour Roli took Daughter on a trek with his young son across field and dale to a creek bed low in the forest where the humid leaf-covered ground rose on either side, dotted with white shells. Roli showed her how to tell older shells from newer by their colour, showed her how they become blanched and faded with age. There, standing in the rich loamy humus of the forest, he warned her that she must not tell anyone about the snails, or the French would come and harvest them all, to sell them and eat them. There’s good business in snails, he said. At least, for the French.

She came home bursting with news, eyes wide and shining with the adventure. She told me how they went first this way and then that across the field and through the forest. They passed old German bunkers, concrete corpses piled on top of each other, crumbling remnants of the war. Daughter thought they were so old they should be in a museum. Roli said that no, they shouldn’t be, because they’re German.

I suspect she might have been trying to ask what makes something valuable and worth preserving. And I suppose, in a roundabout way, he was trying to answer her.

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Houses here are nothing like the wood-frame constructions back home in Canada. They are built of brick and mortar – even the interior walls – a fact that is novel only to an outsider like me. Thirty centimeters of brick insulates against the heat and the cold but can still be prone to humidity. In the winter, after a heavy rain, moisture beaded on the cold tile floor and left a creeping humid shadow on the North side of our house. We moved the furniture away from the walls so the air could circulate, and fed more wood into the fire. These buildings, Husband tells me, need the dry heat of a wood fire. He stokes the wood stove and, with deep breaths, coaxes the flames brightly alive. We monitor the corners of the room and within a couple of weeks, the dampness recedes.

The buildings that have stood the test of time have not been spared the wrinkles and ailments of age. Once handsome but modest homes whisper stories of endless days past, of lives lived and left behind, their secrets shuttered behind rotting roletta (roll-down blinds) and rusty, moss-covered gates. Many stand derelict and abandoned, hunched over like old men, sagging under the weight of memory and neglect. Some ornate details remain as mere shadows of their former elegance, fading into the stained and crumbling stucco and buried under vines. Occasionally, a young tree protrudes through a gaping hole in the patchwork of mossy clay tiles on a swaybacked roof, a jack-in-the-box surprise whose day has come and gone.

Interspersed among these régi házak (old homes) are the brightly colored, pristine, but usually vacant and barricaded homes of wealthier Europeans who can afford a second part-time residence in another country. Here, in the Hungarian countryside, they enjoy a level of luxury that is out of reach for them back home, and just as out of reach for the average Hungarian.

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Something we’ve been wrestling with is the burden of owning a house. How it ties you down. How it collects far too many items, the useful and the useless, along with dust and dog hair, the accumulating debt of maintenance. Even vacant homes need regular tending.

We live in a dilemma of two countries, two homes, and only one life to live. Why aren’t we happy to settle in one place for our remaining years? Why this yearning to be sometimes here, sometimes there?

Daughter is terribly homesick for the past, for the life she had in Canada two years ago. She hardly notices that somewhere along the way, she shed part of herself and has grown into something braver, fiercer and more keenly observant. The terrible truth she doesn’t want to acknowledge is that home is now also here, also nowhere.

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She unloads her stories along with her pockets onto the dining table, mindlessly removing her scarf, hat, coat, and boots without pausing for a moment or a breath. God, but she is pleased with her discoveries and treasures. She carefully washes the dirt out of the snail shells and wraps them in paper towel and ribbon to give to her friends at school.

While I prepare supper, she tells me about passing the reeking dog-shit mountain, an artefact of the dog-breeder’s compound, describing the effects of the stench in great detail, how she could smell it before she could see it, how she felt the bile rise in her throat.

“Ew,” I say, scrunching up my face, “That’s gross.”

She promises to take me to see the snails tomorrow, and now I’m sworn to secrecy too.

---

Driving daughter to school in the morning takes us through what can only be called a hamlet, home to a clutch of houses, a long-closed italbolt (pub), and a muddy, rutted logging road leading off into the forest. A few shuttered and tidy houses are tucked neatly behind modern fencing and automatic gates, protected by video cameras and keypad locks. Others seem held together merely by magic or faith and the help of the chickens and pigs moseying about their own business in the front yard.

Most mornings, we pass an older gentleman sporting a traditional Hungarian hat and a bushy beard walking on the side of the road. There’s nowhere to go in this hamlet and nothing to do, unless you’re visiting a neighbour (and there are very few of those). We speculate. Where could he be headed at 7:30 a.m.? Daughter thinks she’s seen him in our village, walking a large dog. But old men like him are ubiquitous. Every village has its own. Is he the same man or another? Who’s to say?

I point to a white house where the front lawn has been given over to firewood, a chopping block, and woodchips, and say I think he lives there. Daughter argues that he can’t possibly live there. It’s no more than a shack. A shed. Probably it’s where he stores his wood. Nobody could live there, certainly not an old man like him. It would be too small for a man and a large dog.

But someone does live there, I say. She’s quiet a moment, digesting the idea, and then she says that if he lives there it must be cozy and lovely inside with a warm fire and many blankets and pillows and that surely he is comfortable and happy. And so is his dog.

I hope so too. After all, what does a man need, late in life, other than the ability to provide himself with food, warmth, and shelter, and to have somewhere to wander with his thoughts?

His brim-covered gaze meets mine for the briefest of moments, and I wonder what he sees, how he sees us. Are we simply a small green projectile, a flash, blazing through his morning, or does he see us as two tender souls protected by a flimsy metal carapace hurtling forward in time?

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“Are they alive?”

“Oh, no. They’re all empty. But if we go back there, maybe in April or maybe May or, I don’t know, when the snails come back, we can see alive ones.”

“Does Roli sometimes go there to collect snails for supper?”

“No, he doesn’t do that. Besides there aren’t any alive right now. He’d have to wait until later, when the living snails are there. Do you know why you can eat snails but not slugs?”

I shake my head but she isn’t waiting for an answer.

“Snails have their guts inside their shell but not in their body, so when they’re out of their shell, they leave their guts behind. But slugs don’t have shells. Their guts are inside their body, so we can’t eat them because that would be gross.”

I try unsuccessfully to visualize the anatomy of a snail.

“But eating snails is still gross and I don’t want to eat them.”

“Have you ever tasted them?”

“I don’t think so. But maybe I did once. But, anyway, they’re gross.”

I try to recall the taste of escargot and can bring to mind only the comfortable and common flavours of butter and garlic.

Later, I look up how to prep and cook snails, and am not at all reassured. You must feed them for several days to ensure anything toxic they might have consumed is excreted before cooking and eating them. This seems like more effort than any hors d’oeuvre is worth, and there are less complicated and expensive ways to consume butter and garlic.

Daughter tells me that she thinks she can remember the way to the snail forest: straight across the field from right there, in front of the house. I peer at the line of trees and bushes across the street, at the even green of the field beyond.

“Through there?”

We are already scheming.

---

In other villages, you would be forgiven for thinking yourself in a third-world country. The signs of poverty are astounding, as are the contrasts. Front yards strewn knee-deep with garbage and debris rub shoulders with immaculate lawns and shiny Mercedes.

After nine months, the sight still leaves me aghast. How can people live like that? The question returns again and again as a refrain. The answers are many and complex. Poverty contributes but is not the cause of these dumpster-pile properties. The cause is something else, something less tangible – perhaps a lack of pride or a lack of attachment to the place one calls home.

At the edge of a nearby village sits a ramshackle house featuring a grubby couch pushed up against the outside wall between the entrance and a stack of old tires. The yard exhibits a wanton sprawling similar to the suburban spread of big cities. Items litter the ground from the doorway outwards in a broad and expanding arc, as if spewed from the mouth of the house. Sometimes, a white car lies on its side in the dirt driveway, displaying its underbelly to the occupants of the couch. Other times, it sits wheel-less, belly nestled in the dry dusty ground.

An office chair on casters has been placed just outside the front gate on the sidewalk, facing the road. Occasionally, when we drive past, an amorphous woman sits in the office chair looking relaxed and distinctly unhurried. There’s a sense of languid leisure amid this junkyard chaos.

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In Hungarian, this language that I am slowly learning, the word for slow is lassú. Indeed, I am progressing at a snail’s pace, but I am progressing just the same. Some days, I can’t imagine how I will ever be proficient enough to pass the citizenship language interview. Others, I look back on what I could understand six months ago and feel mighty proud of how far I’ve come.

There’s an important distinction to be made between slow and unhurried. Slow, a measure of speed, is so often a frustration, a reproach: “You’re too slow!” or “Slow down!” Slow doesn’t consider one’s state of being the way unhurried conveys a lack of urgency, a calm in-the-moment acceptance that things happen in their own time. The plants won’t grow, the kettle won’t boil, and sleep won’t come faster for wanting them to. I’m trying to apply this to my own progress. Am I slow or unhurried?

I find my inability to communicate an incredible challenge, like being cut off at the knees. Every small interaction is a hurdle and an exercise in humility. I am handicapped, unable to communicate effectively with the people around me. I resort to gestures and pointing. Occasionally, I slip unintentionally into French. I blush and lower my eyes. I know some of the words, but I am hesitant and I mangle the pronunciation. I am lost.

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The snail’s home is fascinating. The main part of the snail’s body is called the foot. Attached to the foot is the head and the antennae-like sensing horns. The rest of the body is secreted inside the Fibonacci perfection of its shell. If need be, the snail can close off the opening with a hard mucus seal called an epiphragm, shutting itself in, away from the world.

As an evolutionary choice, a shell makes sense. The snail can hide from predators, protect its organs, and retain moisture even in dry climates. But it has to lug its house around everywhere it goes. What does a house weigh? Could you carry yours on your back? Have we grown so accustomed to the weight of our life that we have ceased to notice it?

Slugs, on the other hand, have made something of an evolutionary compromise. Their Achilles heel is that they need a humid and damp environment. But, not having a shell has its advantages: slugs can thrive even in environments where calcium is not abundant, they can move faster and conserve more energy than snails, and their flexible, stretchable bodies can fit into crevices that would be off-limits with a shell. Plus, the French don’t want to eat them.

I’ve read that sometimes a snail leaves its shell and becomes a slug. My biology education is rudimentary but this strikes me as highly unlikely. How could that be, what with the internal vs external guts? Do they leave behind their organs along with their shell? I’m more inclined to think once a snail, always a snail. I suppose evolution is always a next generation affair.

It’s not that slugs don’t have shells; they do. They have a shell inside their body, which is an interestingly impossible thought: internalized armor. The key differentiation between slugs and snails seems to be whether the body can retract into the shell. Some slugs have tiny external shells — too small for their bodies. I picture scantily clad wanna-be snails in crop tops and short shorts, bellies bulging, semi-slugs.

When the shell is entirely gone, they become slugs.

What of all these fragile abandoned homes? What of us? What if you could remake yourself anew into an entirely different creature? At times, this seems an appealing thought, but I’m not at all convinced such a transformation is possible.

Do you fit in your house? It’s an important question.

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The roadside ditches provide clues. Among the abundance of litter – cans and wrappers and such – are here and there piles of dumped garbage – unidentifiable large items, furniture, burst-open bags of clothing and other materials.

Crews of community workers clean up the roadsides and ditches on an ongoing basis. They make their way pushing bicycles and carrying tools, leaving a trail of tidy bags dotting the roadside behind them. The workers sit together on the ground under a tree to eat their lunch. Sometimes they nap. They seem unhurried and relaxed, perhaps, because there is never an end to the work. There is always more garbage ahead and more reappearing behind just as soon as the crew has passed through.

Something of a symbiotic relationship is at play. On the one hand, community cleanup provides steady work for a segment of the population, people who don’t have the skills or inclination for other types of work. On the other, disposing of more than permitted in the weekly curb collection is expensive. You can rent a dumpster and pay to have it hauled away or you can take it to the dump, for a fee. Roadside dumping is a handy solution, as long as you don’t get caught doing it.  

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Our backyard is home to an abundance of slugs, particularly along the edge of our property bordered by the wall of Roli’s barn. They emerge in the dusk, making their way under moonlight across the lawn to the patio, leaving glistening trails behind them. The nights belong to the slugs, as do the early mornings, before the dew settles and they scurry back to the cover of tall grass and leafy debris.

When we moved here, we were warned to kill them with impunity and advised to sprinkle salt around the rose bushes and vegetable garden. At first, we skewered the slugs with a pointy bamboo stick or bashed them with the blunt end of a black walnut branch. Killing them was more difficult than you might expect, and none of us really wanted to do it.

But one evening, I remembered that in my childhood we’d used salt, and so we tried dumping a spoonful onto a fat yellow slug that had made its way up to where we were sitting with our wine glasses, enjoying the evening. Its death was agonizingly slow and painful to watch, and the goo-puddle it left behind, near impossible to remove. Husband and I quietly agreed not to do that again; better to squish them in the grass and be done with it.

Why this stark difference between the sought-after forest snails and the undesirable, tongue-like backyard slugs? What makes the one a delicacy and the other a pest?

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I admit to harboring a tinge of envy for those who enjoy the freedom of having nothing to lose. But what might that mean, in practice, for me? I try to imagine a life with nothing in it and no attachments. This seems neither realistic nor desirable.

Husband and I walk a tightrope of compromises, top-heavy but striving for balance, trying to negotiate our freedom despite the burden of having plenty to lose. If we can’t escape the danger, perhaps abandoning the burden of safety is our only choice.

What is the weight of freedom? How might it bow you down?

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The field with its rows of winter wheat rises gently so that, from our bedroom, the bright orange morning sun seems to come up from right behind it. Our walk across the crest of the hill to the low-lying area on the other side takes no more than a few minutes. The secret snail forest is not much more than a large stand of trees nestled at a bend in the creek in slightly marshy ground.

So far, the snails have evaded the French. They go about their snail business, doing what snails do, despite the price they might fetch in fancy restaurants, despite the careless footsteps of passersby. Their pale shells remain snuggled ghost-like on the forest floor. Did the occupants leave in search of adventure and a new existence, or did they simply fade into time and space, into the ground, leaving only their humble homes behind?

And, what of us? Did we become free or merely undesirable? No one will eat us now, not even the French. How much does our life weigh, and can we carry the burden? Will it slow us down, and would it matter?

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Some evenings, Husband and I browse the real estate listings to see what’s for sale nearby. We keep an eye on the prices and ogle the interior photos. On drives, it’s not the ostentatious homes that catch our eye but the crumbling vine-covered houses, the colors and meandering lines of their decay. We point them out silently, slow down slightly as we pass, each one a fantasy of a different life, a period costume to try on. We have our local favorites, the ones that if we had enough time and money, we would restore. But we have neither, and perhaps it’s a good thing.

I’ve come to realize that fixing an old house does little to restore its beauty. The charm of an old building is in its age and the signs of its aging. Renovations are a long series of compromises that require invasive structural, electrical and plumbing work. There’s the damp walls, the leaky roof, the drafty windows, and the intractable problem that life is no longer lived the way it once was. What use is it to keep looking behind us, backwards in time?

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I bend over to pick out a clump of grass and chuck it to the perimeter. It has been a good many years since this fenced-off area has been a garden, and there is work to be done to prepare the soil for planting. This garden-to-be, too, is an anchor, a weight that ties me to place and time, another choice that needs tending. I move across the width of the plot, clumsily hoeing the rows. When our neighbour two houses down demonstrated how to plant krumpli (potatoes), it looked so easy – light, graceful and rhythmic. I am anything but, though I am perhaps beginning to get the hang of it.

My back and legs ache, and I am slightly short of breath, sweating, and alive. I find a small white snail shell, pick it out, and toss it to the side. It lands in the shade under the bushes and rolls a little farther, coming to a halt against a trunk. The trees bordering the garden have sent out long runners of sinewy roots. These, I tug on, pull up, and hack off. The work is physically demanding and I am fatigued, but it’s a good thing. No one can ask for more.

Will the seeds I have planted sprout and grow, and will I be here to see the harvest? The future is shrouded in uncertainty, which is perhaps as it should be.

I take a long drink of water, my face turned up to the sky. I hear the chorus of birds, the barking dogs in the distance. Our black and white cat darts past chasing something too small to see, and the sun warms my skin in the still-cool spring air. A light breeze lifts up, whispering, “It’s good here, you’ll see.”