The woods of rural Massachusetts were the personal playground for me and my best friend, Jeane, in the 1960s. We must have been around 8 when we were allowed to just go off on our own for hours. I’m guessing that our parents were not aware of child murderers and kidnappers – even though there were two prisons and a state mental hospital all within a 10-mile radius of where we lived. Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, was housed in a nearby maximum-security prison, then called Walpole State. Between my house and Jeane’s, there were several small pastures that were used for hay, with a few acres of woods and old stone walls that separated them. A typical 17^th century property division. There was a small pond at the bottom of one of the pastures. In the winter we skated there.

In other seasons, we used that pond for field research. We loved to study the creatures that we found. Tadpoles and fairy shrimp in the spring. Frogs, snakes, and even leeches in the summer. Naturally, this meant a revolving door of “pets” in my room. But turtles were the best. So docile and easy to feed – even algae-covered baby snapping turtles were sweet and friendly. Unlike toads and salamanders who were not happy captives and usually had to be released on the same day.

Sometimes our pet turtles would become extras in our elaborate Barbie games. If they were small, they might take on the role of a dog or a child, with a troll doll with green hair for a sibling. At least there was a family resemblance. If they were bigger turtles, they might be someone’s boyfriend. Back then there was no such thing as helicopter parenting, or else our imaginations would have been suppressed and we wouldn’t have been able to construct such interspecies dramas.

As for turtle stories, although I always loved The Tortoise and the Hare, I preferred the Japanese fairy tale of Urashima Taro. The imagery is what got to me – or maybe it was just the way my mother told it.

The story is about a fisherman who rescues a turtle on the beach from being tortured by young children (hmmmm…). A few days later a large turtle comes up to his boat and invites the fisherman to his underwater kingdom, grateful for saving the turtle on the beach who turned out to be a princess. The fisherman agrees and rides on the turtle’s back and is taken to an undersea palace where he is the guest of honor. But after what seemed like a few days of partying the fisherman got homesick. The big turtle agrees to take him home but also gives him a box that he says will protect him as long as he never, ever, opens it. Upon arriving back at his village, the fisherman sees that everything has changed – and that 300 years have gone by since he left yet he is still the same person, wearing the same clothes. Distracted, he opens the box, and poof, he is suddenly aged – by 300 years. He then hears a deep voice coming from the sea saying we told you not to open the box for in it was your old age.

I’m not going to get into a scholarly analysis here but it’s kind of like the American story of Rip Van Winkle and there are similar stories like this from many other cultures.

My reputation of being a weirdo half-Japanese kid with strange pets stuck with me until high school and in 10^th grade, a boy who I had absolutely no interest in gave me a box turtle thinking it would win me over. It didn’t. By this point, I was more interested in looking at Vogue Magazines with my friend, Greg, a boy that my parents never worried about my being alone with… While most other teenage boys had a poster of Farah Fawcett in a red bathing suit in their rooms – usually facing their beds, Greg had a poster of The Divine Miss M – Bette Midler. We would play records and sing to Do You Want to Dance, dreaming of the not-too-distant future when we could be adults and leave our small town.

I would have released this turtle into the woods had it not been that the boy brought him back from his grandparents’ place in Missouri and I didn’t think it could survive a New England winter. So, I kept him. For 44 years.

The turtle came with me to New York when I moved there at age 18 to go to art school. During the years that followed, he lived in crummy apartments, had a full run of a Soho loft, and even had weekend houses to go to in the summer. He never judged (at least I hope not) as he witnessed my sorrow, elation, disappointment, success, failure, bad jobs, good jobs, and all the people – including some horrific boyfriends – along the way. He was fond of berries, tomatoes, and peaches which I would buy for him at the farmer’s market. He loved earthworms, slugs, and grasshoppers – which I would get whenever I was in the country. When I couldn’t dig up the earthworms myself, I would buy them as live bait at rural gas stations where they would be in paper cartons like the kind you get with Chinese takeout, wedged in the refrigerator between the Budweiser and the diet Coke. When I was living with an irritating pig man, we always had leftover Chinese takeout, and I would mark the worm containers in capital letters with a Sharpie: NOT COLD NOODLES. There were quite a few times when he’d be about to grab the container, fork in hand. And more often than not, I’d be tempted to just let him keep going and not say anything.

Since I never expected to have the turtle for this long, I never even gave him a proper name. He was just Turtle.

One day in July 2018 he seemed a little off – not wanting any of his favorite foods and looking kind of dull and grey. The next morning, he wasn’t moving at all. My reaction was a mix of relief and loss. I did always wonder if he would outlive me and how I would have to plan for his looking-after when I was gone. Turtles do live a long time. After all this time living with humans, he couldn’t just be turned loose into the wild. Well, I guess I didn’t have to worry about that anymore. When I looked at his quieter than usual body, it seemed like I had just opened the forbidden box and that those 44 years with Turtle might as well have been 300 years.

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 as I was digging the hole, I came across earthworms in the damp, rocky soil. My instinct would have been to collect them and put them in a container with air holes but now I paused, and I said to the worms, well, here’s your payback, now it’s your turn to feast. A month later the shrub took to the spot and was covered in purple blooms – with dozens of monarch butterflies flitting all over it. The plant was taking nutrients from Turtle, its roots now enveloping his body. The cycle of life goes on.

A year later when my mother, who had been living in Honolulu, was at the end of her life, she would tell stories from her bed – including Japanese fairy tales at my request. And of course, she once again told me the story of Urashima Taro. For a few moments, I was 5 years old all over again.

As was her wish I arranged to have her ashes dropped into the Pacific Ocean so that she would find her way back to Japan. I decided to do this on what would have been her 86^th birthday on February 24. One of her friend’s daughters belonged to an outrigger canoe club in Honolulu and agreed to take me out on one of their practice runs. It could not have been a more perfect day – calm sea and little wind – which is reassuring when you’re two miles out in the open sea in a 24-inch-wide canoe. Just as I dropped the biodegradable bag containing a lifetime reduced to a pound of ashes into the very clear and blue water, a large, nosy sea turtle came over to see what we were doing.

And I knew right then that my mother would be fine now, that this turtle would be her escort, perhaps leading her to my Turtle, now living in a palace at the bottom of the ocean.