Beachwalking

I ran on the beach on Friday morning. I didn’t go there intentionally to see if any oil had made its way to the shore; in fact, I was nearly done with my run when the thought crossed my mind to look for oil coated trash. Never crowded even when oil is threatening to pollute it, the beach was still populated by a few families – vacationers? - with small children playing in the sand, a few walkers, a jet skier taking advantage of the warmer weather. Plenty of trash along the waveline, but no oil yet.

On Sunday we were in Pascagoula and walked out on the pier and stared into the horizon but couldn’t see smoke from burning oil. A friend closer to New Orleans said she could smell the oil. We are still waiting to see if the disaster will be as catastrophic as everyone seems prepared for it to be. Perhaps a sense of impending doom is inevitable after the Katrina tragedy. If the oil spill wipes out as much fishing and tourism as the pessimists predict, this area will have an even harder time recovering. But I’m sure people will stay.



What I did notice – and stuck in my pocket – were a couple of pearly pink shells that reminded me of some shells my grandmother kept in a small glass box in her living room. Hers looked like boats with a little seat for a tiny sea man to row upon. She also had a little sanddollar in her box, some scallop shells, and tiny conjoined pink shells that looked like butterflies.

My memory may be fabricating, but my impression was that she had collected them on a trip to Florida. These shells were nothing like the dusty white ones we would occasionally find among the stones along Lake Michigan where we vacationed every summer. Florida was an impossibly far locale for a family with four bickering children in a station wagon back then. We went to Michigan and camping for vacations. And I give my parents credit for taking us to Colorado, also. But these shells, arranged artfully in their display box, seemed like treasures from someplace exotic.



The sand dollars eventually were crumbled into dust by eager hands. And the wings of the butterfly shells were halved after too many vigorous simulated flights. The boat shells were sturdier, but the collection finally disappeared without notice from the side table where once it had been centered prominently. When my grandparents broke up housekeeping to move in with my aunt and uncle, I don’t remember seeing the little display case among the household effects distributed to family members, nor would it have been a treasure that someone would have said, “You know that box with shells? I would really like to have that.”


The collection meant something to my grandmother, and I wasn’t the only grandchild who liked to push up the little latch on the little box to handle the smooth shells inside, but in the end, it was just a box of random shells. I don’t even know if she gathered them on the beach on a sunset stroll with my grandfather, or on some lonely walk by herself, where her mind wandered from past to future while her eyes selected random treasures that would trigger memories of a lost moment.