the shell lady

She is in her 90s and she is in the States where she is dying. I never met her but I wish I would have. She has lived in this little village for 50 years. What a place this must have been when she arrived. In those 50 years she collected shells. Her condo was loaded to the gills with shells, organized into containers by type and colors. She must have had a million shells. We were told to take what we wanted. So we did...we brought a truckload with us to the park for the "ladies" as Mrs. Texan calls them, the female snowbirds who like to do shell crafts; I call them the Snowchicks.

The Shell Lady did a lot of crafts, covering wine carafes and catfood containers. She glued shells into the shape of fish. Made flowers out of sand dollars. I grabbed these two as examples of her work.

We stored most of the shells in a friend's bodega but I took photos of SOME of the ones we kept out so you would have an idea of the magnitude of her obsession.

Sand dollars...we have hundreds of them.


She had sea horses.


The scallop shells are some of my favorites and a real treat when I find one intact. The Shell Lady made my few scallops seem pathetic and commonplace.

I was thrilled after the storm to find these shells. This is my collection. The Shell Lady had a roomful.

I have never been a fan of shell crafts. Never. However, now that I have all these shells, guess what everyone's getting for Christmas.

Only kidding. I want to hold on to my few remaining friends. I must say, though, I do like the sound these chimes make. Until walking the beaches here, I had never heard the sound water makes as it washes over a mound of shells and this chime is a pretty good imitation of that sound.

In the Shell Lady's bedroom was a wall of books - a whole wall, top to bottom of ROMANCE NOVELS organized by author, the books in such good shape they looked unread. I didn't know that there was a genre of romance novels dedicated to cowboys. If I had known that, and had read some of them, I might have moved to cowboy country a long time ago.