Lana Whited at Roanoke.Com

It's funny how major news stories in the world at large and the big news in one's own life may have very little to do with one another. Three big news events occurred in my life this week, and you won't read about any of them in your newspaper.

First, my mom is coming home from the rehab center on Saturday, nearly five weeks after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. Second, I celebrated my birthday this week. Both these events I knew about well in advance, including the fabulous birthday party my friend Tina always throws.

The third event, however, took me completely by surprise.

Thursday evening, an Eastern box turtle buried her eggs in my yard. And I SAW it. I even caught it on VIDEO (the video camera was a birthday present two years ago).

I've been a huge fan of turtles since I was a child. I had an aunt and uncle with a rural mail route in a place like Endicott (if you don't know where Ferrum is, forget about trying to find Endicott). The tricky mountain curves were lined with mountain laurel and rhododendron, and the area was heavily populated with box turtles or "terrapins." Their favorite spot, of course, was the blacktop. Every time we encountered one, I was allowed to climb down from Uncle Jim's truck and move the turtle off the road. Every time this happened, my Aunt Hazel had to move, too, to let me out. She never complained and never refused to stop. So I developed a fondness for turtles, and also for aunts.

Some turtles I put in a cardboard box in the truck bed and took home with me -- once from Southwest Virginia to Ohio. I didn't know then about turtles' homing instinct, and I sometimes wonder if any of mine are somewhere in West Virginia, headed this way. Of those I adopted, some lived and some died. I have since kept several turtles, including a river cooter about 12 inches long, named Harper Lee. I was in my 30s before I was wise enough -- or generous enough -- to understand that, while some turtles make good pets, they're a lot happier in the wild.

So I was especially pleased, this Thursday afternoon, when a turtle crawled out of the wild to share her spectacle with me. Around 5:30, my friend Katherine discovered the turtle backed up to a deepening red clay hole near the deck. The turtle dug a while longer and began to drop her eggs just after 7. We're sure she laid at least three, and I understand box turtles usually lay five or six. Then she began to close the hole. Well after 9, I went out with a flashlight, and she was still hard at work, raking in clawfuls of dirt. Throughout the whole process, she remained relatively oblivious to us and our cat Franny, who watched from a respectful distance of two feet. The turtle was methodical and only paused to nibble a spoonful of canned cat food I placed in front of her nose.

Now we are left with the relatively low-maintenance task of monitoring the eggs' hiding place. We understand that the eggs should hatch in about three months, the uncertainty owing to the fact that temperature is an unusually important influence on reptile eggs. It should be eight or ten weeks before we're out there staring at the ground a dozen times a day.

I learned the gestation period for box turtle eggs on the Internet, which I found to be a veritable fount of information on turtles. Here are ten fascinating turtle facts you can find on the World Wide Web:

1. Turtles almost never make noise, but you can actually hear a tortoise call on the web site of the California Turtle & Tortoise Club. It's a pretty safe bet you haven't heard one before.
2. You can see plenty of pretty pictures of turtles and tortoises, and one of the best sites is the California T&T Club's photo gallery. This link is organized alphabetically by scientific name, and the Eastern box turtle's scientific name is Terrapene carolina.
3. There is one startling fact about turtle reproduction: female turtles can lay fertile eggs for perhaps as long as four years after mating. An experiment cited in Encyclopedia Britannica Online confirmed this. The hatch rate is also significantly better than that of any hens I've ever had. In the first year of the experiment, all but one of 124 eggs hatched. Maybe male turtles just have better batting averages than roosters.
4. Descriptions of turtle mating behavior are particularly entertaining. Britannica reports that "The male's part in the mating display may include various types of head-waving, antics such as lunging at the female while roaring, or, in some aquatic species, gracefully swimming backward in front of her while stroking her lores (cheeks)."
5. Guess how much different turtle click art there is -- then multiply that by about 40.
6. Aquatic species of turtles are about three times faster than land species, even on land. They're much speedier in water. A tagged green sea turtle once swam 300 miles in ten days.
7. Turtles are thought by some to be quite intelligent and as trainable as lab rats. (Of course, if you've ever seen a turtle struggle to scale a large rock it could easily skirt, you might question this.)
8. The study of reptiles and amphibians is called herpetology, and most advocacy groups refer to themselves as "herp" societies. There are about 150 organizations registered with the National Reptile and Amphibian Advisory Council (NRAAC -- the only way you'd ever catch me in a shirt with "NRA" on it). Most of these groups are in states with lots of coastline, such as California and Florida. Virginia has four groups listed with NRAAC, including the Blue Ridge Herpetological Society in Brookneal. The best-named groups are the Hoosier Herp Club (in Indiana, of course), and the Reno (Nevada) Tur-Toise Club.
9. From at least one rescue organization's web site, you can adopt a tortoise. The detailed application includes questions such as "Have you ever kept a tortoise? Where is your tortoise now?" and the request, "If possible, send a photo of the area where your tortoise would live" (the American Tortoise Rescue allows only hatchlings and recuperating tortoises to live indoors). I suppose a person with a real sense of humor could adopt both a tortoise AND a greyhound, then try to get them to race.
10. Finally, there's that famous homing instinct. Hatchling sea turtles find their way to a seaweed-rich spot in the Atlantic called the Sargasso Sea -- and nobody really has a clue how they find it.

By far the most intriguing thing about our Eastern box turtle is its longevity. Although reports of long-lived specimens aren't always trustworthy, most boxers in the wild are believed to live between 20 and 40 years, and there are documented cases of them living to be over 100. Teddy Roosevelt returned from an Amazon expedition with a red-legged tortoise which lived to be at least 85 at the Bronx Zoo. A popular story in turtle books has one Eastern box turtle, passed down through the same family, living over 140 years. A tortoise living on St. Helena who died in 1918 was said to be 120 plus however many years old she was when she arrived. Another lived on the island of Mauritius 152 years after having been brought there as an adult. Interestingly, it also died in 1918.

Perhaps turtles fascinate us because they are among few animals who can live as long as we do. As I watched my visitor laying her eggs Thursday night, I wondered how the world will change in the lifetime of her offspring. Some of them won't survive to cross the blacktop, and some may still be around when I've reached my mother's age. My visitor was no spring chicken herself, her rings worn down and markings fading. On that summer day long ago when she climbed out of the ground, maybe I was a hatchling myself.

At first, the news events of my week seemed totally unrelated. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to see the pattern. I celebrated my birthday, and the embryonic turtles lie in wait for theirs. If birthdays always remind us of our mortality, a box turtle is a very favorable omen. I've been thinking a lot about mortality lately, especially my mom's, as her illness threatened her life span. My mom, of course, has very much in common with that terrapin, whom we caught in the very act of becoming a mom -- laying the foundation for birthdays and lives to come.

If my news events of the week had made the paper, you would have seen this headline: Life Goes On.

What's time to a turtle?