Snail

I live in Arizona, but go to school in Santa Barbara.  They have the most amazing snails there.  To this day it remains unclear to me why I find snails so enchanting, but perhaps it has something to do with the tangled silver trails they leave all over the sidewalks. Slugs are a different story.  Having stepped on my fair share of slugs as a barefoot child running around in Pennsylvania I am not fond of slugs. R.I.P. you poor slugs I stepped on.  Snails though....

True Story:  This snail was only halfway across the sidewalk when I started trying to photograph him.  Yes, it took me almost half a sidewalk at a snail's crawl to figure out how to get a close up focus with what was, at the time, my new camera. (See illustration below).  He almost got away.  I should have said, Sad But True Story. 

 Hmm... as a child I did have an imaginary friend that was a snail. His name was Tootsie Roll.  Because I thought his shell looked like a Tootsie Roll.  Ah, I was quite the child.