Snippets of Memories - The Turtle

Certain things that I watch on tv or read in a book will take me back in time to some memory. Sometimes a scent or a piece of music will do the same thing. Here is a strange little memory that I haven't thought of in years and years, but oddly enough emerged while I was watching an episode of Very Scary People about Jim Jones. The programme said that when he was young, the dynamic cult leader would hold preaching sessions with his friends nodding and listening, and would perform funeral services for animals killed on the road. 

I must have been no more than eight years old, because we still lived at the old house by the highway, the big old yellow brick house that my parents rented out in the country before my father built our house. I had been at the farm where my grandmother and my uncle lived. The Thames River ran through the farm land and the river was a favourite place of mine. Naturally, the river would attrack all kinds of wildlife and there were fish and crayfish and ducks, as well as turtles. 

That particular day, I had discovered a small painted turtle that had been run over by some machinery or the farm truck or a tractor in the laneway of the farm. I loved animals and really felt for them, so I showed someone, maybe my mother, this tiny dead turtle. The turtle was placed in an empty Meggezone tin. Meggezones were a type of lozenge that my grandmother always had on hand. 

Later that day, likely after my father had come home from work, back at our place, a solemn little service was held at the edge of the field beside our home. My father said some appropriate words, I'm pretty sure my older sister and my mother were also in attendance, and the little tin was placed in the ground and covered up. My father would do things like that, when I was young. I thought it was very nice to do that for the turtle, although none of us were particularly religious or attended church. Later my father joined a church just so that he could sing in the choir. He had his own version of spiritualism. 

So there is my little snippet of a memory. I find that I do more of this as I get older - harken back to things in my childhood, my past. Maybe you have a similar memory.