This essay has eluded me. Stopped me dead in my tracks. Initially, I thought it’d be a breezy time of writing about my long time shelling passion and the wonders we’ve discovered here on the shores of South Korea. Easy, right? But then 1, 2, and now 3 weeks have passed by, and I’m wondering why I feel so hung up. Stuck. And then I realized why. The speck of idea sand agitating—rounding, spiraling, and curling into shell shape in my mind—wasn't an essay about shelling at all. It was an homage to motherhood.
It was the first thing I felt I was good at. And that’s probably because my mother declared it so. I can still hear her long ago broadcasts on the beaches of Sanibel Island or the north end of Honeymoon Island: “Look what Jennifer found!” “Another olive!” “Eagle Eyes!” And I was good at it because I was patient. And I was good at it because it was a solitary activity. But mainly, I was good at it because while I scanned the swash lines for the familiar swirl of a Shark’s Eye or the serrated edge of a Scotch Bonnet, I was pretending to be Karana from Island of the Blue Dolphins harvesting red abalones or Ramon from The Black Pearl freediving pearls. So when I found my first abalone shell in South Korea—a common shell here—I felt like I had found something as rare and sacred as The Pearl of Heaven. Fool.
As it turns out, abalone shells are discarded and piled up on the shores of South Korea much like the indigenous oyster middens of Florida. And while South Korea also has the same Neolithic shell mound sites—Dongsam-dong Shell Midden in Busan, for example—our abalone discovery was the result of a more recent anthropological phenomenon: throwing waste from a seafood restaurant’s back door to the shore. But still, my first abalone! I was suddenly eight-years-old again, standing in my mother’s bedroom and spellbound by that univalve. She used a large red abalone shell as a jewelry dish, and I can remember tracing my fingers over its air holes, mirroring my eyes in its mother of pearl, and dreaming of the day I’d find one of my own. My first abalone in South Korea resurrected a childhood dream of finding rare shells in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. So I reached out to my sailor friend, Darrell, and inquired about his Golden Cowrie. I started mentally planning a trip to French Polynesia. I drooled over photos of giant top shells and 9-inch augers. Elizabeth Bishop whispered in my ear at night. Visions of paper nautili danced in my head. What delusions of gastropodic grandeur this simple ear shell had inspired! Though ultimately, my mother had inspired the obsession.
Because shelling is an obsession. Like agate-hunting on Lake Superior or scallop diving in Homosassa, these single-minded activities flood you with intoxicating, yet hare-brained notions of existential revelation: I should have been a geologist! A scallop hunter! A professional sheller! My husband is a rock hound, so he gets it. He looks at a mountain and sees the potential for aquamarine, or red beryl, or sapphire. He looks for quartz veins and glacial striations like a hunter looks for the white flag of a deer. And shelling, much in the same way, is a simple matter of learning how to look. Eventually you memorize shapes and patterns like the torpedoed olive or tessellated cone. The imprinting becomes so strong, in fact, that you may find yourself shelling in people’s homes. A shell’s form spied on a mantel signals like alma mater insignia. The question is always the same: Where did you find that? It’s an obsession that has driven me out to the beach at midnight, wielding only a flashlight, a spring low tide, and the dim hope of discovering a rare junonia--after finding just 6 small shards of one earlier that same day.
My mother is the only person in our family to have found a junonia. It was some time in the early 80’s at the north end of Honeymoon Island. She found it in a muddy embankment, not on the sandy shoreline. When I’m at her house I marvel at it, turning it over and over again in my hand—visually seized by its creamy color overlaid with spiraling rows of cinnamon squares. I’ve often thought its pattern would make a stunning dress: a strapless Cocktail with a thigh-high slit and a silk slip that peeks out like the shell’s outer lip. Its body whorl hugging hips; its penultimate whorl bolstering breasts. Perhaps I’ll make buttons one day out of my 6 small shards.
After our great matriarch, Grandma Barnes, shelling was the one thing that drew my mother’s side of the family together. Each sister—and years later even myself—owned a print of The Sanibel Stoop. We all dreamed of finding that coveted Scaphella junonia. We all prayed for big storm stir ups the week before our Sanibel Island vacation. We all read Rosamunde Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers. And we all honored nature’s common wealth, her bounty, as we magnanimously bartered nutmegs for apple murexes with a friendly stranger, yet openly admitted we’d wrestle that same friendly stranger to the ground if we both laid hands on the same junonia, at the same time. It has become, for me, not only a family legacy, but also a way of life. Meditative as prayer, addictive as gambling, and sometimes as intrepid as mining for rubies in India, as you wade out into sharky depths for horse conchs or get caught in a cut at rising tide, forgetting time as you root in a sandy shelf for angel wings.
Through all the highs and lows of my life, shelling has always returned to me like a tide—faithfully, predictably—ever reminding me to be patient while I wait for the miracle. Shelling encourages me to seek goodness, to appreciate spontaneous generosity, and to understand that we cannot control when these gifts will arrive. Shelling, like motherhood, is a long game. You may wait years for revelations to come full circle or for the appreciation to be expressed, even as the memories pile up as high as an oyster mound. Memories forgotten, misremembered, or faded just as shells blanch over time. But good memories, just like my mother’s abalone shell, will always turn back up.
