Snail Hotel

Bloganuary prompt: What is your favourite memory?

I have given up figuring out why I can only remember very few memories from a time before puberty. This might have to do with our family situation but I don’t know. Maybe it is not important. 🤷🏻

Our family stories are so often told a re-told, mixed in with Super-8 films and a few pictures. Then there are the memories my sister brought to us last summer. She seems to have a large capacity for remembering stories, details and people.

One exception is the story of the Snail Hotel.

When I was about five or six, my dad was a Lutheran minister in a village in northern Germany. We lived in a big manse with a huge old garden. Especially in the summer, we spent a lot of time playing in that garden.

One day my sisters and I collected a large number of snails and built a “snail hotel” with different rooms for the snails to move around in. ( I don’t think I had been to an actual hotel at this point).
At lunchtime, my mother called us inside but we didn’t want the snails to leave (had they not paid their bill?). So we took a large cardboard box, placed all the snails inside and put them in the foyer of the house. At some point, an hour or so later someone discovered that the snails had escaped and wandered all the way up the walls of the foyer. 😀

I don’t know what happened after or who cleaned up the tracks. But to this day we still have a good laugh about the snail hotel.