Turtle Soup
for Fran
I’ve always had this thing for turtles, mostly as curmudgeonly metaphor. Sure, there were the occasional ones picked up from woodland walks or saved from highways as a kid and kept until I felt sorry for them and liberated them close to their place of abduction so they could find worried friends and family. Ashamed, I quit picking them up at all. My sister had some for a long time “for the kids,” kept in luxurious fake aquariums that too often went uncleaned until the climate threatened incipient salmonella. So I kept my distance as when watching sea turtles swim to shore at dusk to lay hopeful eggs I’ve never seen newly hatched scrambling toward their rightful baptism. My mother, too, in her old age came across a turtle in the park behind our house and thought it was too cold to be out all alone so late in the year, so she secreted it in our compost pile beneath the new-fallen leaves, burying it among the scraps of celery and carrot tops until sanity relented and returned it. Steinbeck described turtles best in the Grapes of Wrath, comparing them to the Joads’ precarious persistence for dignity in pernicious poverty, plodding, plodding, plodding, toward vague promise. I’ve always rooted for the turtle despite the fact that it isn’t pretty and fluffy, and it lacks bunnies’ binkies with sudden joy. Sometimes, there are accidents that roll them over onto their shells. With soft underbelly exposed and little limbs flailing helplessly about, inciting deep compassion from biblical bowels, they compel curious uprightness. Turtles with the toughest shells must make the best soup with meat tenderized by trauma that produces keratinized protection to cradle precious vulnerability, as it’s the gruff curmudgeons who seem rough as tortoise shells on the outside who often hold the most fragile nacred wisdom for all of us trying to make the arduous journey out of the sea across the road to secret leaves of hope for Compassion’s future scramble. Would we but soften our hearts to see beneath hard-edged camouflage of barbed armor, we, too, could discern a secret longing buried deep, feeding until liberated, a longing for lost tribe or a better, warmer one that didn’t abandon or forget about the one once here who suddenly vanished. Wise chefs, full of compassion, pick curmudgeon turtles up gingerly, removing their shells with care, to reserve them for service. They cry over strong beautiful meat, tender, bloody, raw, yet salvific verum sarx, remembering that upside down, the shell holds buried story that can still be righted. © January 2018, Tess Lockhart. All rights reserved. |