The woods were fluttering with moths and oozing with slugs.
The path I mowed in the spring to the Gulley Bridge and stone wall, is thick with grasses and bushes taller than me. I gather the morning’s rain from them as they brush up against me. My boots sink in mud, wade through fern-covered marsh, soak in the rushing tannin-colored streams.
The woods are dark, wet, and comforting.
I lean my hand on the big old hickory and when I take it away a tiny slug is sliding across my finger. I place my finger near a small slug traversing a mushroom. It pulls in its antennas, then reaches them out again, testing my finger.
But the slug decides against it and curls its body under the mushroom instead.
I walk further and there is a thin slug hanging about an inch and a half long, hanging by its tail from what looks like a spider’s silk. I think to free it, but then wonder how the slug could have gotten there.
The strand is attached to a low-hanging maple leaf. I squat resting on my heels and watch as the slug twirls and spirals as it dangles. I can see that the thread it is hanging from is growing longer, though, like watching a clock, I can’t see it happening.
And I wonder if the strand isn’t a spider’s but one made by the slug. A quick way to travel perhaps?
I hold a stick near the slug’s head thinking it may attach itself to it, but instead, it pulls in its antenna and stops descending.
Zinnia is walking under the swaying slug and I think it must be frightened. So I call the dogs and sit on a log three feet away. I’ll be still and watch it from a distance, give it space. I sit for a while, but it doesn’t seem to move. I turn my head for just a moment, and when I look back, the slug and the strand are gone.
I can’t find it on the forest floor. But it doesn’t matter.
The slug got to where it was going and I got to witness something I’d never seen before. Something I didn’t even know was a possibility.
