Heather Cox Richardson writes: Observers called the results “seismic” and “jaw-dropping,” not just a blue wave but a “tsunami.”

Yesterday I was in 1st Street Books, one of my favorite bookstores and came across a book I loved in the past, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey.  Today as we savor the results of a tsunami, it’s important to also remember the very small and what we can learn from the companionship and majesty of a snail.

The author is bedridden with an illness and a snail enters her life.  She writes: “In a March 2009 article in the New Yorker, Atul Gawande wrote, “All human beings experience isolation as torture.” Illness isolates; But the snail … the snail kept my spirit from evaporating. Between the two of us, we were a society all our own, and that kept isolation at bay.”

And here’s another way snails contribute. “Slime travel has intrigued some innovative researchers in the Netherlands. Hoping to improve the comfort level of colonoscopies, they are designing a small robot that can travel snail-like through the mucus-coated intestines of humans.”