Bleeding Tooth: A small, round snail native to South Florida. Two white protrusions at the aperture, each with a spot of red, give the shell its name. Common.

My mother began collecting seashells in 1954, after we moved to Coral Gables, Florida. She was appalled by the tacky souvenirs sold everywhere: glitter-covered shells glued to straw purses and hats; pink conchs severed to make night-lights; magnificent staghorn coral sprays painted Day-Glo orange and accompanied by a plastic Jesus. We frequented a shell shop out on US 1, where rare collector’s items were displayed beneath the glass counter at the register. Holding tight to my little brother’s hand, Mother would memorize these and look them up in her book when we got home.

Outside the shop were bins filled with shells for a penny, nickel, dime, or quarter each. My older sister, Gracie, carefully searched for the best specimens. Having just started second grade, I gave no thought to my selections. If I had a dime to spend, I picked from the penny bins until I had ten. At the bleeding-tooth bin Gracie chose a cream-colored one with a black-and-red-striped pattern. It was beautiful. Mine were all entirely ordinary, no different than the ones we found washed up on the beach.

Gracie soon lost interest in shells and gave all of hers to me. I still have that bleeding tooth. I’ve never seen another like it.

 

Tiger Cowrie: Smooth and egg-shaped, with a long, narrow opening. Brown spots on white. Common.

Though not found in Florida, tiger cowries were in the dime bins at the shop. When my little brother, Charles, was a toddler, Mother gave him one. For some reason he liked holding it when he went to sleep. Mother kept a number of tiger cowries in a basket on the screened-in back porch and she gave one to every child who moved into the neighborhood.

 

Turkey Wing: A bivalve with a color pattern and shape that resemble its namesake. Common.

Besides bleeding teeth, we could find turkey wings in the sand at Key Biscayne. Once, I scotch-taped two turkey wings to one of my dolls so she could be an angel. At Tahiti Beach, a small, private stretch of shoreline just a couple of miles from our house, we found green sea urchins on the seawall. Mother wouldn’t allow us to disturb them if they were still alive, but sometimes we found a lone dead one, its spikes washed away, and we brought it home.

In third grade I began riding horses and no longer thought about shells as much. I put my collection in a dresser drawer with my other treasures: the horse-related ones—the strands of horsehair I’d found trapped in a fence, a baby tooth my favorite foal had lost in his feedbox, the sliver of a hoof trimmed by the blacksmith—along with smooth pebbles from a neighbor’s driveway, pine cones, empty butterfly cocoons, my Davy Crockett hat with the fake raccoon tail, a leaf fossil my pen pal had sent me, and three rocks my father had brought back from one of his trips up north.

But if Mother bought a shell from beneath the glass of the shop’s counter, I still sat on the couch with her while she read about it in her book. Then we would thumb through the pages, marveling over each specimen. We’d linger over the photograph of the Glory of the Seas. Mother’s book said fewer than a hundred specimens had ever been found. “Can you imagine that?” she’d say.

 

Junonia: Creamy with spiral rows of dark brown and circular or squarish blotches. White aperture. Rare.

Once a month in Coral Gables people left old furniture or boxed items in front of their houses for the trash collectors to pick up, and kids ransacked the piles for treasures. One month Charles rescued a junonia shell. It wasn’t a very good specimen. There was a long growth scar on the aperture and a green stain embedded in it. But the other side was perfect. Even though I was in high school and didn’t collect shells anymore, I wanted it. I had never seen one in person before and found it beautiful.

After some intense bargaining, I convinced Charles to sell me the junonia. He immediately regretted the deal, and for years afterward he tried in vain to get it back.

 

Paper Nautilus: Fragile egg case of the argonaut octopus. Not a true shell. Boat-shaped. Consists almost entirely of a spacious body whorl. Rare.

After my first divorce, in 1974, my four-year-old son, Bobby, and I moved from Colorado to Coral Gables to live with my parents. We intended to stay for perhaps a year, until I acquired some financial stability, but we lasted just four months.

Mine was the first divorce on either side of the family, and my parents were angry and deeply ashamed that I had failed as a wife—and as a mother, in their eyes. When I was at work, Mother would wash Bobby’s mouth out with soap if he let slip a damn or hell, words I permitted him to say. Though I’d cautioned him to mind his language around his grandparents, it was just too much for the little guy to remember.

Bobby and I found solace on the beach: The gentle lapping of the surf. The sun baking our skin browner. Sunbathers’ voices and laughter in the salty breeze. We filled our bucket with smooth white bivalves, cockles, turkey wings, and orangey baby whelks, no more than an inch and a half long. We combed the needles beneath the Australian pines for the little white snails I’d called “periscopes” as a child.

Early one Saturday morning, at low tide, we found a cockle half whose interior was a deep purple instead of the usual white. As we walked farther, we found another deep-purple cockle half. “See if they fit!” Bobby yelled. Knowing it was highly unlikely—there were thousands of shells on that beach—I sifted through the bucket for the first one. They snapped together perfectly. We cheered.

As the weeks wore on and our pile of shells grew, Mother’s attitude toward me softened. Since I’d left home, she hadn’t thought much about shells, but Bobby and I had sparked her interest again, and she began accompanying us to the beach. In the seaweed tangle that fringed the tide line—Mother’s favorite area to search—we found whelk egg cases and tiny white spirulas, the internal shell of spirula squids.

The shell shop on US 1 was long gone, but Mother and I found another on Krome Avenue by the Everglades. I purchased a large horse conch—Florida’s state shell—and a fine whelk, white and pale gray and nearly a foot long.

Beneath the glass counter were two paper nautiluses, both white. I had seen them only in books. I almost cried, they were so beautiful and fragile. Though they were very expensive, Mother bought both: one for her, and one for me.

 

Triton’s Trumpet: Spindle-shaped, usually white and yellow-brown with an orange aperture. Reaching up to two feet in length, it is one of the largest mollusks in the Great Barrier Reef. Once considered common, they are now rare, verging on endangered.

I was never a shrewd collector. I should have gone for the largest specimens or the ones with the most distinctive color patterns. Instead I was drawn to the shell that was a little off—a slight growth scar, an irregularity. Perhaps my affection for the trash-pile junonia influenced me.

My second husband, Jack, whom I married not long after I moved back to Denver from Coral Gables, dismissed my collecting as a child’s pastime and scorned my mother’s gifts: The pelican’s foot. The maple-leaf triton. The strawberry top with its red spiral cords. The chambered nautilus. The precious wentletrap, once believed to be so rare that rice-paste copies were made in China and sold as the real thing. And, of course, the whelks—Mother’s and my favorite. “You can never have too many whelks,” Mother said.

Not long before I divorced Jack, he bought me a Triton’s trumpet I had wanted. I don’t know why. He had become increasingly violent, and he wasn’t the kind of domestic-violence perpetrator who apologized between attacks.

My Triton is fourteen inches long. Soon after I brought it home, I read in National Geographic that the Great Barrier Reef was being destroyed by the crown-of-thorns starfish, whose natural enemy is the Triton’s-trumpet snail. Overharvesting of the snails to satisfy the demands of collectors—such as myself and my mother—had allowed the starfish to proliferate. Whole colonies of wondrous, squishy-bodied shell makers were being wiped out. After learning this, Mother and I both stopped purchasing seashells.

 

Australian Trumpet: Largest-shelled gastropod in the world. Can grow up to twenty-eight inches. Spindle-like shape with high spire. Pale apricot fading into creamy yellow in color. Common in northern Australia and Papua New Guinea.

I was adrift after my second divorce. Wanting stability for Bobby, I sent him to live with my first husband and his new wife. My parents severed ties with me, believing I was shirking my duties as a mother.

Once again I walked the beach in search of peace, this time in Oregon, where I’d relocated. Oregon’s beaches were littered with clam fossils and stones worn smooth by the ocean—all curiosities to me. The ocean crashed against rock formations and mumbled across the sand. Rain. Wind. After each trip to the coast, I returned to my dismal little apartment with wet feet and a bucket heavy with my finds.

In an attempt to reestablish some sort of relationship with my mother, I sent her a box of clam fossils. She responded by sending me her magnificent Australian trumpet. Cautious phone calls began between us.

During one call she asked that I send the trash-pile junonia to Charles. He had recently purchased a perfect specimen, but he wanted the one he had found in the trash more. He would give me the perfect shell in exchange. I agreed, not because I wanted the perfect specimen—I’d had the trash-pile junonia for more than fifteen years by then, and it was like an old friend—but because I wanted to please Mother. I wanted a relationship with her, no matter how tentative.

 

Atlantic Carrier Shell: Squat, conical, two to three inches across. Attaches empty shells, pebbles, and shell fragments around its whorls, presumably to serve as camouflage. Uncommon.

After a few years of phone calls, I flew to Florida for Christmas. This became an annual tradition.

It was difficult for Mother to leave the house now that Father was retired. If he was home, he expected her to be there too. But each visit she managed to find a day for the two of us to spend at the beach. Once, we found a fossilized whelk—probably two million years older than the little orange varieties we picked up the same day.

Then Hurricane Andrew hit in August 1992. Father, furious at the overwhelming cleanup effort residents faced, took off on foot. Mother was left in a house without electricity, with a car crushed beneath a ficus tree and streets made impassable by storm debris. When I called her each night, she confided in me about their marriage, revealing details that were difficult to hear. I had been working at the Center Against Rape and Domestic Violence for a few years by then, and her stories mirrored those I heard while staffing the center’s hotline. And, though not as violent, her experiences were eerily similar to ones I’d had with Jack.

Weeks later, after Father finally returned, Mother told me I was no longer welcome in their home. I believe she regretted telling me her secrets. I still called every Sunday, but our conversations were strained.

That first Christmas after Hurricane Andrew, she sent me the carrier shell from her collection. It was a scruffy-looking thing, crusted with broken bits of shells and lumpy rocks. I imagined its creator had gotten through hard times as best it could.

Mother spent the final year and a half of her life in a nursing facility with a respirator snaking down her throat. The last time I saw her, I placed a tiger cowrie in the palm of her hand. Her fingers closed around it, and her face crinkled into a smile.

 

Whelk: Conical sea snail, usually around four inches long, though some species can grow much larger. Often cream colored with a pattern of gray folds. Common.

A couple of years ago I moved into a retirement village and had to do some serious downsizing. My shell collection went from five shelves to two, not counting the larger shells on lone display and the dozen or so whelks scattered about.

I’ve kept a few rare and uncommon shells: the junonia, the paper nautilus, the carrier shell. I’ve also kept the ones Mother sent me from her own collection. The bleeding tooth. Shells and rocks friends brought me from their vacations. Fossils I picked up on the beach. The purple cockle half Bobby—now Bob—and I found fifty years ago. (He has the other half.) The small, ocean-battered Triton we found during his first visit to Oregon. Various turkey wings, tulips, and spirulas. The fossilized whelk.

My life story on two shelves.

 

Glory of the Seas: Conical, four to five inches long, with a tall spire. Golden brown with fine net pattern, almost resembling tents. Found in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Once regarded as the rarest shell in the world.

One afternoon, in an upscale antique shop in Oregon, I saw a Glory of the Seas in a locked display cabinet. My heart pounded so hard I couldn’t hear myself think. If I hadn’t pledged never to purchase another shell, I might have bought it. Instead I asked the shop owner if I could hold it, and when he handed it to me, I had to remind myself to breathe.

Mother had been dead for almost twenty years by then. Yet, for a moment, with the Glory of the Seas in my hand, I forgot. I couldn’t wait to call her.