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After taking my fifteen year old daughter Amy on a quick school's-out vacation to Disney World, we visited a place called Sanibel Island, that I read was one of the three best places in the world to collect seashells. The island is situated so it catches the currents from the Gulf of Mexico, and a multitude of of all kinds of seashells wash up on its beaches. Sanibel also contains a large wildlife refuge, covering half of the island, complete with white egrets, pink spoonbills, alligators and a few crocodiles.
Since I had never been to Florida, and figured since I wouldn't be going too often I reserved a very nice place right on beachside, with separate rooms, a full kitchen and laundry, and a covered walk out patio. Amy checked out our rooms and brought her luggage in, then went out to see the beach.
She got to the edge of the sand and kneeled down to pick up several shells. After grabbing three or four she stood up to see that the whole beach was covered with them. The wide layer of white sand on the high part of the beach was from the accumulation of fragments of thousands of broken seashells.
I later found places next to a jetty where the current brought the shells up into a pile that was three or four feet thick. It was quite a paradise for people who like to walk on a beach and look for seashells, and seeing Amy enjoying it so much made me feel like I had done a good job in picking our destination.
When I watched Amy walk on the beach, I couldn't help but remember her at 5 years old, running up and down the beach at Carpinteria on the Pacific, racing the white edge of the waves, smiling with happy eyes and sun-bleached blond hair jutting out from under her blue hat.
It is a fine thing to hold to the memory of those days that we understand later were so special,
And recall reaching down to pick up that perfect seashell, floating in the warm eighty degree Gulf water, see again the breeze of a coming thunderstorm moving the palm fronds, feel the hard rain when we got drenched by a sudden downpour, remember the beautiful Gulf Coast sunset, and the thirty or forty people who had come down to the beach just to watch it
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