Sand Dollar

"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"









The old man's granddaughter could not have articulated such things, but the raw beach sunshine which had shone on her cheeks as she landed her small kayak onto the shore of the Caya had brightened her mood.  What seemed like the long paddle from one island to another was over and her arms, still so young, were not sore.  She thought of it little as they approached a small inlet of the shore where there were no people, just the bleached out dunes and driftwood and the shells, astonishingly, several feet thick.  The grandfather, youthful feeling himself now in his limbs, had already set the nose of his kayak deeper onto the shore.  "By god, Zeus has arrived!"

He had kidded some with his granddaughter before, that he spent his life as a sheller, but he certainly knew enough that these conditions upon the shoreline were the magical moments that shellers do dream of.  Sometimes, he had heard, the shells here on the Captiva, Sannibel, Caya Costa shoreline could grow upwards of four feet thick – most certainly, very possibly, the best shelling in the world because of the islands' unusual orientation to the ocean.  "I see here many, many dollars!" he said quickly, filing through a hand full with the same sort of bright eyes the treasure hunters would hold.

"Dollars?" the granddaughter asked mildly, now, quite quickly, inside her element of warmth and sunshine and this bold treasure chest that surrounded the both of them against the silence of a shoreline that seemed created just for them.  

    "Yes, choose as many as you would like.  One for me, a hundred for you.  Don't forget one for grandmother though.  I will tell you right now that if you mention sand dollar to her you had better produce one. Ask me how I know."  The young girl could only imagine what this meant.  Behind them, the silhouette of a regatta lined the horizon starkly against the setting of the sun.  The splash of the bright water was not something you put words to but came to absorb and come to love without thinking of it.  A beach with many people was one thing; a beach with nobody else, as here on the Caya, was something of the imagination.

"Grandfather, I would like to make a deal with you," the girl said now, much more absorbed than the grandfather with the treasure before her.  The ideals of dolls or toys or TV had long left her.  What was quite real was the jewelry lining the beach for free.  "I will find you the Junonia for your sand dollars," she said, not looking at him, but stooping over in what was called the 'Sanibel Stoop," which is the automatic obsession of aligning the mind with the sand and the shells.  

   "Oh, those are one in a million though, please understand."  Few had been found, let alone silly novices in these arts.  "But yes, if you say so, I would gladly give you my dollars for the Junonia."  The sun had settled down into a pink plateau up above the watercolors of the sea.  Sand under the feet felt warm and formed tightly around each toe.  

"I think tomorrow it would be easy to paint the shells we find," she said.  The grandfather smiled.  If it was tomorrow that the great earth should take him, his work would have been done.