On Shells and Rocks

I’ve always been fascinated by seashells. I think it goes along with my love of beaches. When I visit beaches, I spend half my time staring at the sand looking for shells. After most coastal vacations I bring back a small baggie containing a few shells. Often they are imperfect, but I bring the best ones I can find. When I’m lucky, I find several complete shells without chips or holes.

My bags of shells tend to find their way into drawers. After a few months, I can’t tell one bag from another. I can’t even tell whether the shells came from the Pacific, the Atlantic, or the Caribbean. But when I look at them, I remember oceans and beaches, and that’s enough for me.

I’ve searched for seashells ever since I was a kid. Among the “treasures” I uncovered during my decluttering this year was a box of seashells from when I was a child. The cover of the box says “Theresa’s Sea Shells” in my grandmother’s handwriting. I opened it up and recognized many of the shells as ones I acquired when I stayed with her. There’s the abalone shell she bought me one time, probably after I whined about wanting it. There are sand dollars I found, one of them that I painted at some later date. And a rock I painted like a ladybug. Don’t ask me why. Most of the other shells in the box were things I found beachcombing.

A separate box has a sheet of about twenty shells glued onto cardboard and identified by type. My grandmother, Nanny Winnie, bought that for me also. On the cardboard, I wrote my name and grade: “Mary Theresa Claudson 4A.” As I’ve written, in fourth grade I had to use both my first and middle names. I must have taken this to Show and Tell or for a science project sometime that year (1964-65). I had spent a month with my grandparents during the summer of 1964, and I’m betting that was the year Nanny Winnie bought it for me.

Because the purchased shells have less significance for me than the ones I collected myself, I threw out the sheet of labeled shells. But I kept the larger box of shells I found.

Fast forward almost thirty years. My daughter as a pre-schooler was fascinated by rocks. On many a walk around the neighborhood, she would pick up a rock and insist on keeping it. We had a rock bed beside our front door, and if she hadn’t found anything better on our walks, she would squat in that rock bed and choose a rock to bring inside. I was sure she would grow up to become a geologist. (In fact, she became a lawyer. But she does do environmental law.)

I found my daughter’s rock collection in the same cupboard as my shell collection. In addition to some of the rocks she collected (many were returned to the rock bed days after they came inside), we gave her rocks, just like my grandmother gave me shells. There was a very pretty purple crystal in her collection, as well as some polished rocks she acquired at some point in her childhood. She had a sheet of twenty or so rocks glued onto cardboard, just like I had a sheet of shells.

I put the rock collection aside until my daughter visited a few weeks ago. “Do you want me to keep this?” I asked.

She frowned at me. “You know the answer.”

And I did. She didn’t care. She has never been as sentimental about things as I am. The little treasures we acquire through life don’t matter to her the way they do to me.

So I got rid of her rock collection. But I took a picture first.

What childhood collections do you still have? Why do you keep them?