Turtle Stories

On Sunday, we were talking with the wife of the artist who did the little turtle sculptures we bought. He was busy at the time with another person. Each turtle has a symbol on its shell and she was explaining the meaning of the ones we were buying and some of the other ones that weren’t available.

One of the ones that wasn’t available was a turtle with 13 circles on its back and she told us that the turtle shell has 13 large sections which corresponds to the number of full moons in a year. I had never really stopped to count the plates on a turtle shell so this was news to me. Kind of a freaky little coincidence – or maybe something else??

She then told us that her husband was telling the story somewhere when a man got all angry and started calling him a liar. This guy was I guess the head of reptiles at a zoo so he had to have some kind of advanced degree for that. Well, he took a card and I guess sometime later, the artist got a letter from that guy when he discovered that turtles do, in fact, have 13 plates on their shell. She told us it wasn’t really an apology and he didn’t sign his name – guess his ego was too big to do that. Maybe in all his schooling, he never actually took the time to count the plates on a turtle. Having an advanced degree doesn’t mean you know everything.

We also bought a turtle carving from another artist and we were talking with her about turtles because turtles are cool. They live near a pond with turtles and she mentioned putting logs in the pond and then having fun watching the turtles try to balance on them. Yesterday, we were at the turtle pond near the house and there was a turtle attempting to get up on a log to sun himself. But he kept failing because the log would roll and dump him right back in the water. He was persistent but maybe not very smart. Thought it was interesting that we saw that a few days after hearing someone else describe a similar situation.

Probably not polite to laugh at the misfortune of a turtle but it was hard not to. Guess being a calendar doesn’t give them other super powers.