Member-only story
“Hamlet’s Pelvis”
Day 166 of my artwork retrospective
I know what you’re thinking. Hamlet was all about skulls, right? Well, this is a different Hamlet. A very different Hamlet. One who was not only not a human, but also not a male.
But when we rescued a box turtle from the middle of the road one afternoon, the underside of its shell looked like a male’s. Why “Hamlet” is a good question. One for which I have no answer. But if you’ve ever had a name pop into your head when a new creature entered your life, it’s probably the best choice.
All I knew as I cradled the small creature on my lap on our drive home is that his habitat a few miles west of the Miami airport had been destroyed by bulldozers “developing” the area and that he was very, very light in weight.
Fortunately, my mother-in-law was more than willing to give the little guy a place to live in her backyard, and my father-in-law put up a low fence to partition off a large paddock so as to keep an eye on him while allowing him to roam naturally. She had already taken in a South American red-footed tortoise we’d found in a nearby neighborhood, with a ring on his shell indicating that he’d been kept in a container of water by someone who assumed he was the type of turtle who lives in a pond.
Some time passed. Hamlet was no longer a lightweight and seemed as happy as a box…
