Junonia

"Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated"
       – Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea







Now, the old man was never much for laying around, even on a so called vacation.  It was when the banana colored beach towels came out and were flung down onto the dusty white sand at Captiva when he might fidget some in deference to the wishes of the sun bathers then quietly disappear like a puff of smoke and take to his beloved shelling.  Today, they had found their way to Caya Costa, just north of Captiva, without the help of the hotel shuttle boat.  It took some selling, yes, but they took the two rented kayaks and when he and his granddaughter dipped their oars into the water it did not seem like water at all but a concocted cream of some sorts poured into this great cupped shelf of

surrounding land. They had reached Caya Costa from the northern tip of Captiva in very little time.  It was mid day, the sun probed directly down into the green cream and revealed the current as it invisibly swept – inland, then out again – the bottom of the coast and a milky dust rose at each pulse.
"It is the Junonia that we will seek today," he said boldly as if it were some profoundly new project.

"But that is what we look for every day here," the little girl said, now eight years old, tan as toffee, and her white smile benefiting even more from the darkening skin.
"Ah, but the Junonia, you see, is the magic shell of all the seas.  Do you know what you can hear from inside it?"

The girl rolled her brown eyes and shook her head.  A soft roll of waves fluttered the stern.  A lone tern, fixed in on something below the surface of the water, chugged its wings overhead so slow as though it might at any moment simply drop from the sky and plunge in.
"Did you know that I used to seek shells for my living?" he boasted again, now prodding her a bit for amusement.  He could see her lack of interest.  There was disbelief in the girls eyes.
"No, I don't think so," she said.  "What does the Junonia say?"

At that moment, a hundred feet from reaching the bare shore, two silver flashes rose up from the surface.
"Well, I do believe these two know what the Junonia says.  Close your eyes and you can hear them as well."
The two dolphins scattered the surface of the water then slipped back inside the enormous warmth.  At a dune point of the beach old gnarled beach wood.  It had lost its color to the sea weather long ago.  Trails of shells stuck up out of the sand as little streams of water trickled over over the serrated edges.
"The Junonia holds the last wishes of Zeus."