The Lord God Made It All

If you know me, then you know I prefer the simple beauty of nature to the most complicated man made…um…thing  (does anyone have a word for this?) that you could ever find.  This would explain, for example, why my room is color-coordinated to sage green and why I prefer to decorate with plants.  I also like to decorate with seashells.  Yes, I am an avid seashell collector.  When I was about eight years old, my parents took my sister and me (this was before the Fabulous Five were born) on a trip to visit my grandparents in AZ.  While we were there, Kathy and I spent a morning with my great-grandmother - known to us as Granny - making crafts and playing games.  Before we left, Granny let us pick a few seashells out of her collection to take home with us.  I’ve been hooked ever since.  Since I’ve only been to the beach three times in my entire life, I’ve had to rely on others to provide my seashells for the most part.  Dad would go on a business trip to Florida and bring back a little basket of shells, or my grandparents would swing by after a month at the beach with some seastars and cowries for Kathy and me.  Over time, I built up my stocks, and now I have over 175 beautiful shells in my private collection.

I don’t have any rare or uncommon seashells in my collection, to my knowledge anyway.  But the ones I have are so beautiful that I could care less if they were common or not.  Better let them be common!  Then everyone can enjoy them.

Bottom left: Checkered Bonnet. Bottom right: Pink Murex.  Top middle: I haven’t a clue

These are different types of Babylon shells.

Top shells.  Depending on how you’re holding them, they either look like fat tornados or stout ice cream cones.

Common Atlantic cone shell.

Dog conch.  For those who don’t know, conch is prounced “conk”, as in, “Ow!  I just conked my head…”

Delphelian snail shells. I know I didn’t spell that right.

These are two very special shells in my collection.  The purple one on the lefte was picked up at San Fransisco Bay by my friend Elisha.  She later mailed it to me with one of her letters.  The blue shell on the right is the only shell I have of this color.  My friend Sarah saved this one out for me from many that she gathered while on vacation on the east coast.

These I assume are some type of murex shells; I’ve never been able to positively identify any of them.

The yellow shell on the upper left is a Haitian Fighting Conch.  Below it is a Common Hairy Triton (I think the animal that lived in it was hairy because the shell is perfectly smooth).  The shell on the upper right is another conch, but I can’t remember which one it is.  Ditto with the shell beneath.

My brother likes these.  These are cone shells, the deadly cone shells.  The animal that lives inside is one of the most poisonous in the ocean.  Figures.

This is my largest shell, my magnificent Horned Helmet.  Can you believe I bought this one for only $10.00?

And here is my smallest.  And I don’t know what it is either.

These are sea stones, stones that have been rolled over and over on the beach until the sand polished them smoother than glass.  Granny gave these to me.

These are shells commonly found in the Gulf of Mexico.  And I can’t remember what these shells are called either (I must’ve conked my head harder than I thought…) 

Here are my “Hermit Crab shells.  Several of them actually did house hermit crabs at one time or another.

This is one of my favorites - a chambered nautilis.  I have a fascination for the cephelopod family, so when I found one of these the one time I went shopping at the beach, I made sure to snap it up!

This is a small Spider Conch.

Here’s the whole collection.  Somehow, I feel richer owning these beautiful shells than I would owning the finest gemstones in the world.  After all, these are the gems of the ocean.