The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

By: Cathy Salter

This spring, I re-read a tiny book that is simply beautiful. A few years ago an friend wrote, “You must read Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s book, “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating.” Intrigued by the title and a reviewer’s description of the book as “the earthly adventures of a woman and a gastropod,” I ordered it immediately. Viruses are embedded into the very fabric of all life. Luis P. Villarreal The author of the book had suffered from a flulike virus that within weeks caused a dysfunction of her autonomic nervous system. After successive severe relapses, she was forced to move from her rustic 1830s Maine farmhouse with hand-hewn beams and squareheaded nails overhead to a small studio apartment with stark white walls. Barely able to move on her own, Bailey missed the golden-brown hues of the overhead beams with their “knots that told a history of branches and long-ago wildness” that she had studied for countless hours in the earlier years of her illness when she still lived in her rural farmhouse.

See more in this weeks Boone County Journal