Marit Snail
I found a piece of paper in the nature book I was reading. It said "Marit got married in October". "Who wrote that?" I wondered, and speculated on why it had been put in a book about snails. My guess it was someone who was in a boring marriage and thought Marit was in for a slow passage through her life. I put down the nature book with its note and continued with my day. There was something about the phrase that played on my mind. I pictured Marit in her wedding finery on a cool October morning, posing for photographs after her wedding to a boring man. Then I let myself think about her in depth, picturing a bored face on her honeymoon wondering how she could possibly have married a man with the surname "Snail". I lengthened the phrase in my mind to "Marit Snail got married in October". I wonder why she got married in October? Perhaps that honeymoon she went on that I was imagining was in a spot noted for good weather in October. "Marit Snail," I thought "Marit Snail".
Next morning I picked up my snail book but found I couldn't concentrate on it. I was thinking of Marit. Marit had had a quarrel with boring Mr Snail on her honeymoon and wanted to fly back home, but Mr Snail was being difficult, naturally, since he had spent all that money so they could go to a hotspot in October. I pictured Mr Snail, a man of middling height with grey, curly hair exactly the colour of snail flesh. I disliked him.
Marit became part of my morning routine... I would read a few paragraphs of my long snail book, then think about Marit and what she could be doing and hope she was getting used to Mr Snail. "Sometimes she thinks about her October honeymoon, of how disastrous it was," I thought.
In due course, I finished my very long snail book. Who would have thought that 500 pages would be needed to tell me about the creature? As a final gesture, I skimmed through the index of contributors. One of them was a woman called Lady Marit, evidently not the Marit on my piece of paper. Still, it was a coincidence. I took the piece of paper out of the book where it had served as a bookmark and read it again. "Marit got married in October"... Yes, I suppose she did.
7/4/2020
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