wherein the turtle comes home

These long days in the shop are getting harder for me to do. Oh, I can put 10 hours in with only a break for lunch and I can do it again the next day. It's that third day that starts to tell on me and the fourth day, I'm totally worthless...like today. Fortunately this last time the third day was only about 5 hours long. But I'm still worthless today, putzing around and reading. It's a beautiful day today so I'm spending a lot of time wandering around outside.

We left for the city last Tuesday but now we are back home at the country house. We still have three items to move and all three of them are a major production. Or we had three things to move (besides the rest of the shop of course); the turtle, our Lee Littlefield outdoor sculpture and the dining room chandelier. I say had, because we brought Big Mama, our red ear slider turtle, back with us this time.

I spent last weekend setting up the new turtle pond, a stock tank 8' in diameter and almost 2' high that holds almost 600 gallons of water. Her old pond was one of those small kidney shaped water lily ponds that we had sunk into the ground and then used landscaping stones to build a short wall around a section of the yard that included the pond. That way, she could get out and dig around some. Turned out that the only time she ever did that was in the spring when the 'egg laying' was upon her, the actual reason we gave her the yard. For baby turtles. And although she has laid many eggs and we have had various males over the years, we never got a baby turtle.

The other reason she would get out and wander around her little yard was for trying to figure out how to escape. These two states of being usually went together, but not always. There were times when she was just hell bent on escaping. She would walk along the boundary, some places stone wall, other places chicken wire and bricks, prodding and pushing, looking for an opening and climbing.

I didn't sink the new pond, at least not yet. We are uncertain where we want it to be so I put it in a spot I knew would get a lot of sun during the winter but it crowds the gate and is next to a tree so for now it's sitting on the ground. I dug up the grass, leveled the ground as best I could and set up the tank, stacked up the sunning island and filled it with water.

Friday afternoon we put her in a galvanized tub, put her in the back of the truck and headed on home. We also brought her 10 fishy companions, what's left of a dollar's worth of feeder fish. I expect that they will really start to grow now and become food for some of the herons around here.

Today we set up the pond filter and the pond pump. We still have to bring the water plants and the tubs for them and the rest of the landscaping stones. The pond will stay here for at least a year, through all the seasons, so I want to dress it up some. Already I like it where it is because I can see her sitting on her island when I am at my drawing table.

It's dark now and I went out a little while ago and she was still on the island, pulled into her shell. She stuck her head out at my approach. We stared at each other for a while because that's about all you can do with a turtle. I talked to her, came in. I looked again just now and she has disappeared into the water.