"Turtle"

Sometimes we hear something about our own history that triggers a revelation, even if that revelation is tiny to the outside observer. For instance, Mom, Aaron, Gus, and I were sitting around the living room the other day -- Aaron had flown in from NYC to surprise Mom and me for Christmas; he and Gus set the whole thing up -- and for whatever reason we started talking about babies. Babies' first words, more specifically. And then my mom starts telling us about me:

"Nathan started talking really early. He would say 'Mama' and 'Dada' and 'Milk'. He even said 'Turtle' early on." And then she told us that I stopped talking abruptly, a bit after a year old, and wouldn't talk very much again until I was about four. And then I talked and talked and talked.

I knew about the gap in my speech development, but I hadn't known that one of my first words was "Turtle". This really stuck with me as we kept on with the conversation and moved on to other topics. Turtles play a special part in the novel I just wrote, and I've long gone back to turtles in my thoughts, in my heart. I sure don't know what would inspire me to say that at such a young age! Had Mom read me a picture book? Had I spotted a turtle in a pet store and it stuck in my subconscious? Whatever the case may be, something clicked -- something about me and maybe what I was writing *toward* in some of the scenes of my novel. A mystery I'm enjoying unraveling.