Underfoot (whether sand-speckled and bare or shod with city shoes) lie the seashells, sifted by the foam of lapping tides all beachworn and abandoned along the strandlines. As children, closer to the ground, closer to the truth of things we would pluck and pocket and clasp these treasures and greedily read through borrowed books about gastropods and cephalopods and mollusks and mussels and hermit crabs, closer to the truth of things. And so the seasons change but the catch remain ever-changing but ever-present eternal yet fleeting in the cameos they make in our brief lives pearlescent, winking, inviting, reminding, As sure as the sea and as resonant as the swell underfoot, understood, the timeworn seashell.
