There was a small garden snail named Mira who believed, the way snails do, that her shell was the only home she would ever need, until the morning a curious crow flipped over the flat stone she lived beneath and left her exposed to the open sky.
"You've lost your home!" said a sparrow perched nearby, watching the stone roll away down the slope. "Whatever will you do?"
Mira considered this for a long moment, in the unhurried way snails consider everything. "I don't think I've lost my home," she said. "I think I've lost my stone."
"Aren't they the same thing?"
"No," said Mira. "The stone was just where I kept my home. My home is the part I'm still carrying."
She set off across the garden then, slow as ever, her shell catching the morning light, looking for a new place to settle — under a fern, perhaps, or in the crook of a fallen branch. The sparrow followed a while out of curiosity, expecting to see grief, or panic, or at least the particular slowness of an animal that has lost something important.
Instead she saw only patience.
"Doesn't it frighten you," the sparrow asked, "not knowing where you'll end up tonight?"
"A little," Mira admitted. "But I've moved before. My mother moved twice in her life, and her mother moved more than that, and none of them stopped being snails because the ground underneath them changed. The shell doesn't care which stone it's under. It only cares that I'm inside it."
By evening Mira had found a hollow beneath a tipped flowerpot, snug and dim and entirely new, and she settled in as if she'd lived there for seasons rather than minutes. The sparrow, who had expected the story to end sadly, found herself oddly comforted by how undramatically it ended instead.
"You make it look easy," the sparrow said.
"It isn't easy," Mira said. "It's just possible. Those aren't the same thing either."
And she pulled herself in for the night, home exactly where she'd left it that morning — not under any particular stone, but coiled, safe, and entirely intact, inside herself.
