Turtles. I love them. Always have. When I was a kid my aunt had box turtles and a desert tortoise in her yard. The tortoise’s name was Dandelion and whenever my sister and I were at my aunt’s we searched every corner of the yard to find her so we could offer her lettuce my aunt would give us and, of course, dandelions. She was also always the best in class when it came to show and tell days.

So 17 years ago when my Bookman, who was then my boyfriend, gave me a red-eared slider for my birthday I was thrilled. A turtle of my own! Touché (remember Touché Turtle cartoons?) began life about the size of a half-dollar and lived in a 10-gallon aquarium. Now she is the size of a large hardcover book and lives in a 130 gallon aquarium that takes up most of one wall in our livingroom. There is a large piece of wood in the tank that she crawls out and sits on from time to time.

She eats dry dog food. Sometimes we get her a dozen or so feeder goldfish that keeps her busy for a day or two. She also loves grapes and cantaloupe melon. And she enjoys the occasional back scratching especially when, like now, she is molting her shell. The whole shell doesn’t come off, just a thin layer of outside “skin” sort of like how snakes shed their skins. Except turtle shells have thirteen segments and each one comes off separately. She gets really itchy and will stick her backside up and wiggle around in pleasure when she is scratched. She also will bite, fingers look like food to her, so scratching her back is a daring and tricky thing.

Sexing a turtle is not all that easy. We had guessed early on that she was female because of the length of her claws. Male turtles generally have longer claws for grasping the females during mating. But what confirmed her sex are the eggs she lays every spring. We aren’t sure how many she lays because, not having a sandy beach to lay her eggs on, she eats them and we find pieces of the white shells in the gravel at the bottom of the aquarium.

In the winter she only partially hibernates since she doesn’t have to bury herself in the mud to avoid being frozen.

I love Touché, she is a fascinating and beautiful creature with her red “ears” and green and white striped skin. And it’s a good thing I love her because she could live to be anywhere from 50-70 years old.

A few wonderful books about turtles: Turtle and the Moon in which a red-eared slider makes friends with the moon and “plays” with her every night when she shines on his pond; Old Turtle and Old Turtle and the Broken Truth contain beautiful artwork that shouldn’t be enjoyed just by children; Owen & Mzee is a true story about a 130-year-old tortoise named Mzee and a motherless baby hippo who become great friends; Lonesome George by Henry Nicholls, George is the sole known survivor of a giant tortoise species and the book was shortlisted for the Royal Society’s prize for science books. I’ve not read it yet but I’m sure I will love it.

And now, if you feel so inclined to read a poem on this fine Friday, here is one by Mary Oliver from New and Selected Poems:

The Turtle

breaks from the blue-black
skin of the water, dragging her shell
with its mossy scutes
across the shallows and through the rushes
and over the mudflats, to the uprise,
to the yellow sand,
to dig with her ungainly feet
a nest, and hunker there spewing
her white eggs down
into the darkness, and you think

of her patience, her fortitude,
her determination to complete
what she was born to do–
and then you realize a greater thing–
she doesn’t consider
what she was born to do.
She’s only filled
with an old blind wish.
It isn’t even hers but came to her
in the rain or the soft wind,
which is a gate through which her life keeps walking.

She can’t see
herself apart from the rest of the world
or the world from what she must do
every spring.
Crawling up the high hill,
luminous under the sand that has packed against her skin.
she doesn’t dream
she knows
she is a part of the pond she lives in,
the tall trees are her children,
the birds that swim above her
are tied to her by an unbreakable string.