In my neighborhood rocks are regularly used to landscape yards, but as I looked out my window, one of the rocks moved slowly down my neighbor’s driveway. I walked across the street to get a look at this suburban miracle to discover a red-eared slider headed into a desert of concrete and lawns. I picked him up and moved him further back under the trees, but in twenty minutes he was back in the front yard of the house, so I decided he needed rescuing.
He was old and big for a red-eared slider. The red markings on the side of its head were now dark brown. Sliders are pond turtles, so this one was probably washed into the neighborhood through the big pipes that drain this development. He had descended and arisen from the bowels of suburbia. Now he ventured to cross a great expanse of lawn, cement, and townhouses.
I trotted back across the street and gently set Odysseus in a big shoe box. I took Herman to meet the grandchildren who delighted in him. Then Teckla and I drove to the pond near the cemetery. I set him in the mud near the edge. He paused and then slowly moved across the mud and sank beneath the duck weed of Ithaca Pond.
Turtles probably don’t smile, laugh, or sing, but Herman seemed full of joy when he resurfaced wearing a bright crown of duck weed—adorned in green glory. He was home. Odysseus was fully in his element, and all was right with his world. His sojourn through the great desert called Suburbia was over, and now he had song of redemption to sing. In the cold of a Kansas winter, asleep in the mud, he would dream of the hands that lifted him up and brought him home.
