Yesterday was one of those golden October days with perfect temperature and blue skies, leaves on trees and vines just starting to turn color. I was driving along back roads in central Massachusetts and whenever I passed sunlit meadows all I could think about were the juicy grasshoppers and crickets that would be plentiful in that grass this time of year. And it reminded me of my turtle.

My pet box turtle whose companionship I’ve had for 44 years died a couple of months ago. A boy I had absolutely no interest in in high school gave him to me when we were in 10^th grade thinking this gift would win me over. It didn’t. Back then I was considering biology as a career so in addition to being the odd half Japanese kid, I was also the weirdo with strange pets. And I had many – snakes, turtles, frogs and insects in various stages of metamorphosis. Creatures that I would catch in the woods and keep for a while to study and then let go. The reason I didn’t release this turtle is because the boy brought him back from his grandmother’s place in Missouri and I didn’t think it would survive a New England winter. So I kept him rather begrudgingly because I was 15 and at a point where art and fashion were taking over my interest in science. It was more fun to look at Vogue Magazines with my friend, Greg, who my parents never seemed to worry about my being alone with…than to play with creepy crawlies.

The turtle came with me to New York as I was starting my adult life and ended up quietly cohabiting a human environment for the next 44 years. Perhaps he was silently judging me with his beady eyes as he witnessed life’s ups and downs – sorrow, elation, disappointment, loss, heartache, success, failure, bad jobs, good jobs, people who came and went, the constant people who have been there the whole time while watching our aging in the process, cats whose lifespans were a fraction of the turtle’s, and of course, questionable fashion phases throughout the years – but he never let on any opinion. Unlike a cat who will express disapproval in obvious ways.

He was fond of berries, tomatoes and peaches. Many farmer’s market purchases were based on what he would like and then I would eat the rest. And he loved earthworms, slugs and grasshoppers – all of which I would get whenever I was in the country and that was many weekends since I had a cabin in the Catskills. I always carried a small jar with a lid with holes in it in my bag that raised eyebrows if it fell out or someone saw it – taking me right back to being the weirdo kid in high school. If I couldn’t dig up the worms myself I would often buy them as live bait at rural gas station convenience stores where they would be in the refrigerator case in paper cartons with wire handles just like the kind you’d get with Chinese takeout. I, too, kept the worms in my refrigerator – often to the horror and disgust of uptight boyfriends who were long outlasted by the turtle. When I lived with Howie we always seemed to have leftover Chinese takeout so I had to mark the worm containers NOT COLD NOODLES. Though he probably wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference…

Since I never expected to have the turtle for this long, I never even gave him a proper name. He was just Turtle. And one day in July he seemed off – not wanting any of his favorite foods and for the first time in 44 years, really looking unwell. The next morning he was gone.

After a brief two week period in the morgue – a.k.a. my freezer – I buried him up at my cottage in Massachusetts. I planted a butterfly bush on his grave and naturally there were earthworms as I was working the soil. I guess now it’s their turn to feast on him. I now look at the purple blooms often covered with no less than a dozen monarch butterflies flitting about and I hope Turtle is okay in the afterlife.