Loose Leaf Notes

I’ve always been a treasure hunter. When I was young and living in Massachusetts, I dug in old backyard dumps for hand blown glass bottles and other finds. I’ve been collecting shells from beaches around the world for about 40 years. Who knew Marco Island was one of the best places in the world to collect shells? That’s what the visitors guide said and it’s what I discovered.

There are literally shelves of shells on the beaches.  Sometimes I would run my hand through the snow-white sand while sitting on my beach chair and pull up a perfect shell, conches, scallops, cockles and more.

They also have shell collecting boat trips to uninhabited  islands but Joe and I took our own Floyd borrowed kayak for our own “three hour tour.”

Once on the first island and after collecting a “boatload” of shells I spotted a flurry of birds on the end of a sunlit spit, so that’s where we went next.

And it didn’t disappoint.

We had lunch lagoon side.

When I was twenty-something on my first trip to Martha’s Vineyard, I was excited to find a perfect conch shell. I had never seen inside one before and suspected it could have been inhabited, but I wanted it so much that I took it home. It paid me back by stinking to high heaven for weeks. Here, on the island, I noticed about a dozen Florida Fighting Conches on the lagoon shore, lightly covered in sand.  Bingo!  But I soon realized snails were inside, so  I put them back (and even protected them from other shell seekers.

No need to be greedy, and that karmic gestalt of saving the shells, led to me finding more that were long uninhabited. That’s a Florida Fighting Conch in the upper left hand of the above photo.

There was one glitch in which our “three hour tour” turned into four and could  have been more in my mind. It caused me some anxiety that wasn’t about dropping or splashing water on my cellphone (my stand-in camera for the trip) or thinking that a black dolphin was a shark. When we paddled along the back of the island, we eventually hit the current where the river met the gulf. We  could not paddle in the direction we were going but had to paddle in the direction of the current until it shifted.

Joe, who did most of the paddling, assured me we were fine even though I felt like we were heading out into the netherlands and away from our destination. At first, his words were not reassuring because it was not what I saw with my own eyes.  In the end, it was worth the back-of-the-island trip getting to see two dolphins (one gray and one black) swimming beside our kayak.

Some of my favorite things? Birds, shells and flowers. The flowers are coming tomorrow with a trip to the Naples Botanical Gardens. Until then it’s another sunset in Paradise, Key West style. _______Our World Tuesday