My pet turtle

A Story by just Jake

To this day, all I really know about turtles is they move slowly, and have shells. And old man McLaughlin, from down the street, use to catch them and make turtle soup. That's why everybody called him Turtle Bill.

One day I was playing, alone, in my back yard. That's how I spent most of my childhood days. Exploring those 3 acres, like Lewis and Clark, I would make my way back and forth. Climbing trees to get a better view of the next leg of that arduous trail, I explored every square inch of that land. There was a drainage ditch that cut a perpendicular line across the property, near the middle. And whenever it rained, a raging stream of a small creek would develop. And it was in this one foot wide raging torrent, where I found my pet turtle.

I approached it very carefully. I knew that snapping turtles could be very dangerous, and unless I knew for sure this was not a snapping turtle, I had better not try picking it up with my bare hands. So, I ran to the garage and got an old bucket. On the way back to the river, well…ditch, actually. I grabbed a stick and used the stick to guide the turtle into the old bucket. Then stood the bucket up and SUCCESS! I had caught my pet turtle.

He was a decent sized turtle. His shell was about the size of a big mac box. He seemed docile enough. I drug the kiddie pool out from under the back deck. I gathered sticks and rocks from around the yard and placed them in the pool to make a new habitat for my pet turtle. I set the pool up on a slight incline and sprayed water from the garden hose into the pool, making a puddle on one side but leaving half of the pool dry. What a great experiment this would be! My own pet turtle, I could feed it worms and bugs. And it would one day race the rabbit… And win. Oh boy! I was so excited.

I dumped him from the bucket into the pool/ turtle habitat, then ran in to the house to show my mom what a wonderful thing I had found and made.

"Mom!" I said. "Come outside quick! I have something to show you."

"What is it now?" she said.

"It's really neat! Come see what I've done!" I said, pulling on the sleeve of her shirt trying to drag her toward the back door of the house.

"What did you do? Build another rabbit trap? Your sister fell in your last rabbit trap, you know. She could have broken her leg. Then how would you feel? She wouldn't be able to go to ballet or tap dancing or jazz class. Then what would you do? Her teachers say she could be a prima ballerina some day. But you keep digging these stupid holes in the back yard and covering them with sticks. Are you trying to make someone break a leg?"

"Just come and look, mom. Please!?" I said.

"During the next commercial break, I'll come see your new trap or whatever. Now go back outside, you're wet and you smell like earthworms." She said.

So back outside I went. I was so happy. I finally had a friend to play with. Just me and my turtle…

"I should name you." I said to my shelled companion. "Tommy? No, I'm not sure if he's actually a he." "Terry! Perfect! Hello Terry, I'm Jake." We spent a couple of hours just getting to know each other. I had forgotten that I had even asked my mom to come outside until I heard the sliding door open behind me.

"Now, what is this? Just what do you think you are doing? Look at this mess. And is that a turtle?" My mom had a unique ability to ask a question that I knew the answer to and still make me feel stupid. "Just what are you planning to do with this?"

"Well, I thought I could keep it." I said.

"You thought you… Where did you get that thing?" She said. She did not seem as excited about my pet turtle as I initially thought she would be.

"I found it in the back yard, down by the ditch." I said. I was trying to figure out why I was suddenly in trouble.

"Well, you're not keeping it. Just take that thing back down there and… You just wait until your father gets home. Now, you get in that house. I didn't have you so I could just do everything around here and you could just play with this slimy turtle. Those cloths aren't going to fold themselves! You get in that house and wash your hands and face…" She said. I walked in the back door of the house. I heard her yell from outside "WITH SOAP AND WATER!"

I washed my hands and face really good, with soap. I did my best not to make a mess in the bathroom. She seemed to be on a roll, and I didn't want to give her any more reason to punish me. She hadn't hit me for a while now. But her time outs seemed endless. She would say "you just sit there and think about what you've done. You've got five minutes. I don't want to hear so much as a peep out of you, until I come back over here and tell you that you can get up." She once put me and my pal from church on time out. After an hour and a half, my buddy Clint spoke up. He said "Has it been five minutes yet." My mom quickly replied from the other room "just two more minutes." Clint never came over again, after that.

When my dad got home from work that night, we put the turtle back in the old bucket and took it down the street to the lake and let it go. "It's probably better. The lake would be a better habitat for Terry." I thought. He could go swimming whenever he wanted. His rocks and sticks would all have moss and algae and stuff on them. He wouldn't get yelled at for no good reason, either.

I was sad for a while. I missed ole Terry. He had been a good friend, for that afternoon. I use to wonder what he was doing. Was he swimming? Maybe he was working on his house, right next to the lake. That's how I would picture him, just a happy go lucky turtle, digging a hole in the lakeshore and going for long swims in the lake.

I still wanted a pet turtle, though. Then one day I was out in the back yard and I found this weird looking beetle. He was a curious looking thing. He was the lightest of beige in color. He was crawling around on a rotten log. I thought," this guy seems docile enough." So I scooped him up and took him up to the garage. I dumped some old rusty nails out of an old mason jar and dropped my new friend in the jar with a stick. I poked a couple of small holes in the lid so he could breath. I snuck him into my room. I didn't want my mom to make me take him down to the lake. She was watching the afternoon movie and talking on the phone. It wasn't hard to sneak him by, right then.

I kept him in my room for a day or two. We had great fun. He really liked that stick too. He must have been growing because he ate almost half of the stick in about two days. Then his jar started to get dirty, and I couldn't see him in there. So, I took him to the kitchen so I could wash his jar. I remember putting him down on the counter and taking the lid off of the jar. I went outside for maybe two minutes so I could get him a new stick. When I got back, he was gone.

I didn't see him again for a couple of years. I missed him, but not as much as I missed Terry the turtle. A turtle has a deliberate kind of character that a guy can really relate to. This weird looking beetle didn't seem to have any character at all. He just seemed to eat, all the time.

Well as it turns out, my beetle wasn't a beetle at all. He was a termite. And maybe the reason I didn't miss him, as much as I missed Terry the turtle, was he never actually left. He just moved into the wall of the kitchen. Yeah, over the next couple of years, we shared a lot of meals in that old kitchen. He was a good friend.