Happy as a Clam

I am a crazy person. I’m crazy for doing what I did, and even crazier for telling you about it. But I said I’d write a blog tonight after a long, long absence and I’ve procrastinated until it’s late and I’m tired and woe is me. This story I can do quick.

My husband bought a bunch of clams last Saturday for a seafood feed at our friends’ vacation house. He cooked most of them, but decided to cull out some to take home the next day.

When we got back, he found a broken clam and decided all the clams could be bad, so he chucked them in the garbage.

I was livid. He should have just cooked them all at our friends’. He should not have bought them in the first place because there was way too much food already and we couldn’t’ plow through it all (though I tried). He should have been more careful bringing them home. These are all things I made sure he clearly understood after he tossed those clams.

But those weren’t the reasons I was so irritated. I was P.O.’d because I knew good and well that I’d think about those clams in the garbage can, dying a slow miserable death as the heat got to them, wondering what they were thinking in their little clam brains as the life oozed out of them like the yellow goo leaching out of a festering boil, and knowing that they were calling, in their tiny clam voices, “Somebody please help us.”

I knew I’d lose sleep, and I knew I’d remember it with remorse all the days of my life and into the very grave. This is what made me mad as a hornet, fit to be tied, and angry as a skunk tangled in briars.

I went out to that filthy, slimy garbage can and fished out those clams, one by one, amid the coffee grounds, corn husks, and used feminine hygiene products, and put them into a bowl in the refrigerator because, according to Google, that’s how you keep clams alive. I would drive them to the beach two hours away, by golly, and put them back in the bay.

This morning I talked my daughter into going with me and we headed to Netarts. We waded into the ice-cold Oregon bay, full of squishy mud, seaweed, and pointy rocks, and I gave those poor clams back to the clear brown sea. I don’t know how many survived the ordeal in the cooler and refrigerator, and I don’t know what will happen to them or whether they will be able to make a home where I left them, or if the seagulls and crabs will feast on them when the tide goes out, but I do know I will sleep tonight because they aren’t in my garbage can screaming in voices that I would have heard all night long in my dreams.

And if that trip to the beach makes me a crazy woman, I’d rather be crazy than wrestling nightmares for the next six hours.

BTW, it’s good to be back to my blog. You could say I’m, well, uh, happy as a clam. Snicker, snicker.