Turtle Attack! Or why I may never walk again.

Turtle Attack!. Or why I may never walk again.

Bright and early this morning, around 10, I stepped out the front door to evaluate today’s yard work. Now when you live where I do and you’re likely to be barefoot, especially right out of bed, you learn to look for snakes and other critters before you step out.

There it was, right on the veranda, hiding, pressed against the low step into the house. Not just any turtle. One of the ones that never shed their shells. Just keep growing it bigger and bigger and bigger. It’s egg laying season and she’s a couple of hundred feet up hill from the pond. (Pond, a body of water too small to hide a body in. Lake, a body of water large enough the body will be well decayed before ardent searchers find it.)

We watch Sci Fi. We know what’s coming next. She leapt at the same time I slammed the door. That would have been a horrible death, a turtle burying into my chest to lay her eggs.

“What,” you may be asking yourself, “does this have to do with walking again?”

Isn’t it obvious? I’d already gotten up way early so I took a couple of hours nap giving the turtle time to go after someone else.

When I finally got out there, preparing to seed a bare spot by roughing it up with a rake, a task akin to raking furrows into a 5-year-old concrete driveway, the muscles were too relaxed. I pulled that big muscle in the back of my left thigh. It hurts!

Because of that turtle, I may never walk again.

See, told you it all made sense.