Walking along a river, you can always come across something you've never seen before.
One beautiful summer day, I found a large shell. Under it rested what had once been a snail — or, as specialists might say, something that had changed its state of matter.
And that's when I realized I must have spent half a century in some kind of parallel reality: it turned out that I had never seen a snail in the wild. Not once. It's not that I was avoiding them — it just somehow worked out that they kept missing me, and I kept missing them.
Literally five minutes later, nature decided to continue the theme: in the leaves of a bush I spotted a tiny living snail with an elegant shell, more like a miniature seashell. So tiny that I still don't understand how I even spotted it.
Perhaps it was a case of snail reincarnation. Or perhaps the snails simply decided that I was finally ready.
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