She Sells Sea Shells
It was an oyster shell, bleached white. I found it in a box on my aunt’s dresser, the day I showed up to retrieve a few pieces of furniture and cleaned out her whole house to earn them.
I wasn’t emotionally prepared to finger through a whole lifetime in an afternoon. Which clothes might she wear at the nursing home? Did she need her underwear? Why did she have a tiny snuff can in the back of her medicine cabinet? Where did she wear a delicate pair of cream colored gloves, a green pill box hat? Why did she fail to tell me she met Ronald Reagan?
With every revelation of every layer of her life, I stood between the gap of precious memory and piece of trash. Too often, I made the wrong choice. I threw away stories as I sifted through her collected record, stories I wish she’d told me.
Instead, she told me other things. When she could still think, her affection for me swung like a pendulum. One day, I was too loud. The next, I was her DAR heir apparent. We shopped together for hats, a mutual obsession. We fell out over the very furniture I took from her house that day.
Petty, perhaps.
Behind the argument that ended our relationship, something deeper festered. She never had children, and she regretted it.
As I may someday regret it.
I wish she could tell me the story of the oyster shell. I know it had one. Even as I pitched it into the garbage, I knew. It whispered remonstrances from wherever it landed. I always hear them when I cry.
For I have a shell, too.
I was on my honeymoon, driving white-knuckled on the wrong side of the road along the southern coast of Australia. As we skirted a peninsula, the Indian Ocean crashed into the shore.
It was my first time with that body of water.
We pulled into a lay-by and got out of the car. The gale tore at my hair when I walked to the edge and bent over to touch a new ocean. Another notch in my belt of experience.
When I stood, my husband handed me a bleached white shell. “I took your picture. The shell was next to you in the sand. I thought you’d like to keep it.”
Was the story of my aunt’s oyster shell similar to mine? I’ll never know. But, in the twilight of her life, I will paint her shell with the story of my own. I will forget the unforgivable things. I will choose to remember her as a person who made and appreciated beautiful things. I will imagine her, at the edge of some unknown sea, wearing a delicate pair of cream colored gloves and a green pill box hat, laughing as the wind whips through her hair.
This post originally appeared as part of Tori Young’s Tiny Spark Series at her awesome blog The Ramblings. Given that my brain is fried, and many of you may not have made it over there to read the post, I’m re-running it here today. Happy Monday.
Beautiful, Andra. Thanks for sharing these moments. I remember feeling many of these things, and reminiscing over many stories and wondering about others, when I cleaned out my mother’s home after her untimely death 9 years ago. When I look at some of the treasures that grace my home today, I like to think that new chapters are being added to their stories.
I hope you know all the stories behind your mother’s things, Liz, and that they keep her close to you.
And OMG I BEAT LOU!!! Haha!
Lou is gearing up to be District Governor for Rotary 7770 these days. He’s in San Diego right now at the world incoming DG training sessions. I’m really proud to know him.
What the? Somehow this one post has managed to make me cry three times. I think that means you’re doing it right, missy.
It sort of fits where I am at the moment. If we lived closer, we could cry together……and watch Thomas make pee-pee sprinklers.
“She hardly ever thought of him. He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock, might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock. It was lodged, and ground no longer.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King
I wish I could turn a metaphor like that. Lovely.
Interesting that I was reading it moments before I hit your blog. Was a sign of something.
Who knows what, but hopefully a good sign.
It’s as touching and heart warming and heart wrenching as it was the first time I read it. Andra, I appreciate you.
Lori, I appreciate you. I hope you had a great weekend.
It’s still beautiful
I got your Twitter message about the snowflake, Fiona. I’m glad it arrived safely. They said it might take up to a month to get to Belfast, but thankfully, our post was faster.
So glad you reposted, Andra, and gave me the chance to read this, as it is a “tug at the heartstrings” post as well as a gentle reminder of all of the seashells, handkerchief’s, petals and cards that we find, and we leave, in this life. Thank you.
You have so many of these treasures in your own life, Penny. I’ve enjoyed reading about some of them. I know we all have them, but we get so busy. I think we take a lot of living for granted. I know, at least, that I do.
You had better get a wiggle on with your baby making Andra!!
I’m always happy to try.
But, we’re not having kids.
heh, yeah I stick to the trying…NOT to the having!
It’s the best way at our ages. Well, not your age, but our ages.
I’m glad to read this again, Andra. I never forgot it from the first time I read it. If you were to peek inside many of my drawers and hidden spaces you’d find so many little oddities…the things I’ve held onto from my grandmothers and my aunt, three women I think of every day in one form or another. And I will always wish I’d known more stories and pieces of their lives. I hold onto tiny shells and unwearable jewelry and funny trinkets. And someday I hope my granddaughters will of mine. I love this post. I tear up each time I read it.
It’s still a hard one for me to read, Debra. I’m glad it speaks to so many of you. I’d love to know more about the stories behind the things you keep in your life.
This is one of my favorite posts… I guess I read it on The Ramblings…
You did read it there. I remember your message.