In the summer of 1971 my family piled into our blue station wagon and drove six hours to Woods Hole, into the car ferry, and onward to Oak Bluffs, Marthas Vineyard. We stayed in a rented house on Sengekontacket Pond, where I turned over rocks looking for eels and periwinkles most evenings before dinner. One afternoon I filled a bucket full of periwinkles and brought it inside, promptly forgetting about it when we went out to Edgartown afterward. We came back to find they had crawled out of the bucket and scattered; by the time we left that house, the kitchen smelled faintly of rotting shellfish from the ones who scattered the best.

We went to State Beach the morning after a storm, and I had never seen so many shells. I filled a canvas bag with them, my knotted shirt, my sneakers. I brought them back to the house and sorted them by size, by quality, by color. I invented taxonomies and applied them, wondering what sort of storm could have separated so many creatures from their shells. The broken castoffs littered the strip of sand behind the house.

That summer I returned home with a collection of shells in a slightly damp shoebox I had begged from one of the merchants on High Street. Even mixed up I knew their value, I knew which ones were the real treasures, and which were the “regulars”. I didn’t wash them as well as my mother might have wanted, and they still smelled a bit like seaweed and old periwinkles.

We lived in Red Oaks Mill on Lakeview Road, near Poughkeepsie, in the sort of neighborhood where kids rode bikes and cars drove slowly to avoid them. Our driveway ran parallel to the Coffin’s house next door, leaving a narrow strip of grass about three feet wide for the mailboxes.

That’s where I set up a folding table, a folding chair, and an old white wooden drugstore display Eddie Coffin let me use. I organized the seashells in the little alcoves of the display, keeping a few of the best hidden in a compartment behind a broken balsa door at the back.

My mother has a picture of me sitting in that chair at the end of the driveway behind my seashell stand. There are two kids on bikes looking at the display.

They wanted to know why they should pay anything for stupid seashells, because they’re free.

Yes, but these are from Martha’s Vineyard, I explained. There was a storm, and these came up from the deep waters of Nantucket Sound. Shells like this aren’t seen there, hardly ever, and besides, when are you going to Martha’s Vineyard?  And they still smell like the ocean, see?

It worked.  I sold a few, I forget for how much.  

There isn’t a picture of the old lady from next door who walked over and spent a good long while looking over the shells. She asked if she could pick them up, and I said sure. I remember she lifted them up to her nose and breathed them in, her eyes closed. They smell like sunshine and the ocean, I told her, and she nodded. They smell like summertime, Bobby, but they won’t for long, she told me, because summer doesn’t last.  She put them back into the little alcoves of the display one by one, very slowly.  I remember how surprised I was at how knobby her fingers looked holding those shells.

I forget if I was able to convince her to take one, but in any event, my career as a shell salesman lasted for just that day because baseball camp started the next day.  The shells stayed in the box for about a week more in my bedroom before my mother told me to throw them out. I buried them in a hole down at the bottom of our backyard next to Sox’s doghouse.

Some day I’ll go back to that house on Lakeview Road and try convince the people who live there to let me go down and get them back.  I know exactly where to dig.