At 9:00 Molly and I arrived at the Field Station after I had a bumpy ride in her backpack. She unzipped me from her prison and I crawled onto her hand. First, Molly introduced me to everyone including Lenny and his nephew Ben. Everyone seemed happy to see me except for a girl in the back of the dusty garage. Lenny informed me that the girl’s name was Holly and she had an extreme phobia of crabs. Crabs, in her opinion were creepy to watch walk and they pinched everyone they saw.
I jumped out of the cushiony hand of Molly and I slowly crawled up to Holly without her realizing. I wanted her to know that she could trust me. I walked onto her toe, and when she went down to brush off whatever she felt on it, she screamed and jumped back, which made me fling back all the way to Molly again. When I finally got myself in an upright position again, I looked back to see Holly petrified and everyone laughing at her. Molly picked me up again and said; “Now that wasn't very nice to do, was it?” I wanted to say no but the only thing I could do was close my eyes once as an answer, you know since crabs can’t talk. Lenny stopped laughing and turned to Molly and said; “Why don’t you bring our guest to some of the cool plants we have so she can become a better Junior Ranger.” Molly answered back “Okay” and then we were off.
First, we went up the gravel and sand road to see some bushes and I hid in Molly’s hand like a bed because I kept getting attacked my deer flies and green heads. “Here,” Molly said stopping in front of a green leafed bush, “Is a bayberry bush, as you can see by it’s semi spiral leaves, which smell good, here’s one,” she said putting a leaf in front of me to smell. “And bayberry bushes like this grow berries which have a coating of wax. And if you get enough of these berries and put them in a pot over heat to take off the wax coating, you can use that wax to make candles, but one berry weighs less than a mosquito so you need a lot of berries to make a candle. It takes five pounds of berries to make one pound of wax.” Then, she went on to explain other plants to me like Saint John's wort and it’s medicinal uses, Bladderwort and how the seeds on it look like a bladder, Honeysuckle and the dog berries which grow on it in pairs of two, and so much more. Then, we headed to the beach.
Molly and I headed to a marshy area and she showed me things like sea lavender which is pretty rare and it dies if you step on it, pickleweed and how good it tastes, and then, I saw holes, tons and tons of them. Almost as if Molly could read my mind, she explained how there is a large colony of fiddler crabs, like me, that live in those holes, “There are about two million to be exact just in Nantucket,” I sat in her hand with my jaw dropped. I want to meet them all, I thought to myself, Molly might be mad at me, but who cares? I’m a fiddler crab! I pinched Molly’s hand making her drop me, and I scurried into one of the holes, and there in front of me was a male fiddler crab, as you could see from his one gigantic claw and behind him another. I felt more at home than anywhere I’d ever been. Going to the Field Station was the best decision I’d ever made.
THE END
by Holly T.
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