The snail hunter of Kahalu`u

The woman who hunts snails with cooking tongs in her pajamas was smoking a cigarette outside her town house this morning. A long, thin cigarette. I asked if she'd injected bleach this morning. "How long can we put up with this crap?" she asked the smoky air. Still has her job, but expects a pay cut, and has a mortgage to pay. But the snails are fewer; they come out in the rain. The sister to Gerry, a fierce woman who's bent at the waist, told me, "a friend texted to say, this is just like Hitler." She's Jewish. Their brother (Gerry says his education was a waste of their father's money) watches Fox. "If he so much as texts me or calls me or emails me, I told him, it's going in the trash. It's his job, she told him, to make his wife smile, his kids smile, his grandkids--does he want them to remember his hate? She's wearing a shirt with PARIS on the front, a sketch of the Eiffel Tower. "It's criminal," her husband Wally tells me as I continue up the hill with Lilith. Judy of the lush garden says "he's a loon, that one." Her roses were getting smaller in their pots. Now they're bursting into bloom. And there's a lotus coming, too. I looked around, thinking there was a Buddha in her yard, but I must have misremembered.