Point of View: O Wonder!

“Jack, you’ve got to see this,” Mary called out from her perch on the porch.

“Yo vengo, yo vengo,” I said, moving sluggishly from the couch.

And there, on the chimney, by the side of the little porch, it was.

“It’s a slug,” she said.

“No, two of them,” I said, noticing the one moving up toward the one above. “I think. . . . I think . . . they’re doing it.”

She, ever curious, remained, keeping watch, as I, squeamish when it comes to some slimy things, oysters and clams excepted, retreated to the dry, crisp pages of my book.

A few minutes later, she related in somewhat transported fashion what had transpired, the nibbling on the tail and the subsequent slow curling round and round, positing that the one above had been the female.

I got up and went out and saw only one still on the chimney, and the other, I thought, below, in the pachysandra. “He must have dropped off, exhausted,” I said. “It makes sense.”

But, as I learned the next day, from a David Attenborough video that had come up after I’d Googled “the love lives of slugs,” we were wrong. Slugs are hermaphroditic — each possesses male and female organs — and their lovemaking is far more fascinating than I had imagined.

“It’s f—kin’ amazing!” I said later to Mary. “You have to see this!”

Together, then, we watched, with bated breath, the “balletic” (Attenborough’s apt descriptive word) probing and ever more encircling movements of the creatures’ bodies as they dangled from an overhang on a cord of slime, movements that were then repeated, ever so slowly, with their male organs, which had sprouted, if I heard him correctly, from behind their heads, and created in the process a flowering blue sphere in which sperm was exchanged.

“Now that’s lovemaking!” I said.

“The masters of sex!” she said.

And so we stopped, and looked, and learned.