Saving Time in a Bottle

In the corner of the garage in crumbling plastic bags sat hundreds of seashells from Sanibel Island. My sisters and I had collected them over the course of two, week-long trips, one in 1973 and the other in 1975.

I remember those trips like they were yesterday. We stayed in a cottage right on the beach. Mom had to bring all the linens, pots and pans, dishes, food, clothes, beach toys, and anything else we might need while we were there. I'm sure it wasn't much of a vacation for her, but for us, it was paradise.

We'd wake up every morning and head to the ocean. Dad liked the Gulf because it was calm, and Sanibel was even gentler than Pensacola or St. Pete. We could wade out for several yards and not be any deeper than our knees. The sandbars were excellent at low tide, and there was a shallow "pool" of ocean that we girls could safely play in pretty much by ourselves.

Our favorite pastime by far, however was to kneel in the water where the waves hit the shore and search for shells. Colleen and I would take our buckets and our sifters and scoop up load after load of shells. I can still see us kneeling there with our backs against the ocean, and our sun-kissed cheeks covered with Coppertone.

"Look, Sharron! I found a cat's eye!" Colleen would cry and drop it in her bucket.

"I found an olive," I'd say, and we'd look harder to try and find the next perfect shell.

We'd collect bags of shells. Back then, nobody really worried about "over-shelling" by tourists. Shells were the calling card for Sanibel. We even got plastic shelling bags from our hotel that we filled up with our treasures to take home and study back in Kentucky and remember and plan for our next trip.

We sorted them after one trip. The turkey wings in one bag. The sailor's ears in another. The conchs in yet a third. The other visit, we just dumped them all into a box, and that's where they stayed, on a shelf covered with dust and cobwebs, until today.

Today was the day we were cleaning out the garage. The dumpster had been delivered, and it was time to let them go. I pulled the box of shells out to the patio for one last look. I had called Colleen and Jennifer, and neither one of them wanted any shells for a keepsake. I wasn't so sure. I wanted to see them again. To study them. To remember.

I put a blanket down on the patio and reached for the old Sanibel Island bags. They were crumbling plastic by now after over 30 years in the heat and cold of the garage. Some sand dusted out onto my leg, and I brushed it off, remembering days at the beach when it would get stuck to my skin and scratch when Dad rubbed the suntan lotion on my legs and shoulders. I picked up the biggest conch that we'd ever found. It was always in my mind to pour hot wax into it and make a candle out of it like I'd seen in the gift shops. I saw the tiniest shells down in the bottom of the pile, and I remembered how I loved finding the perfect baby olive or cat's eye.

I started to put a few of these tiny shells off to the side for old times' sake. Then I remembered a small, glass spice bottle that I'd packed up an hour earlier. I got it and began dropping the tiny treasures into it. The whole time, I was picturing two little girls, one tow-headed and sunburnt, one dark haired and tanned, kneeling in the water side by side looking for shells. I found myself singing, "If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I'd like to do..." I couldn't get past that line. I just kept repeating, "If I could save time in a bottle..." over and over in my head because I felt like that's what I was doing.

One of the bags had some sand in the corner of it, so I dumped it into the bottle and shook it down. I kept placing shells in one by one, and when the bottle was full, I put the cork in it and set it aside. Then I picked up the blanket, carried the rest of the shells over to the dumpster and dropped them in. I picked up my spice bottle full of memories and went back to work.