The sand on the Florida beach is as soft as powdered sugar against my bare feet as I watch a lone shorebird peck at the dried-out hull of a crustacean.
I snatch this moment, unplugged and untethered from the day-to-day reminders that my calendar delivers, to listen to the rhythm of something greater than myself. The ebb and flow of the Gulf tide wraps frothy patterns around my ankles. The air smells of salt and sunscreen. Then, I see him.
His legs are as thin as the shorebird’s, and his wiry silhouette is set against the orange orb of the setting sun in a hunched posture that Sanibel Island residents call the “Sanibel stoop.” It’s a reference to the scores of beachcombers who bend and sift through hundreds of shells, scattered like stars across the sand.
Why We Wrote This
When she crossed paths with an enigmatic stranger on a windswept beach, a writer was left with a lasting impression: Far from skin-deep, beauty is forged over time.
Honoring his solitude, I move around him. His gray, wind-tangled ponytail hangs down the back of his white T-shirt. As I near, he straightens abruptly, and our eyes meet. His are bright, like sea glass, and reflect the golden palette of the waning day. When he smiles, brown creases carve valleys in his cheeks that appear deep enough to hold a lifetime of belly laughs and tears.
“Evening,” he says.
I nod hello, but my gaze shifts to his hands and the shell cradled in the basket of his fingers. The specimen is flat and round, about the size of a sugar cookie. Its most striking feature is the unbroken whorl of white and brown bands that swirl from its center to its outer edges. It’s perfect, almost unreal, as if it’s been plucked from an underwater bakery case and decorated by waves.
“Do you know what this is?” he asks.
I shake my head but take a small step forward. He holds the shell carefully, as if one rogue breath will turn it to dust. I let my index finger trace the smooth, cool curves that feel like polished marble.
“Some kind of snail?”
He smiles and turns it over in his right hand.
“Good guess,” he says.
With arms and hands draped in tanned and burned skin, he points to the hollow opening, telling me it was the shell of a marine mollusk.
“Some say this spiral pattern resembles a sundial,” the man explains. “That’s how it got its name.”
I stare at the sundial shell from above. Its flawless symmetry is impressive, with lines so evenly coiled and spaced that I can only marvel silently at yet another one of Mother Nature’s masterpieces.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
But what strikes me more than its obvious beauty is the empty space that had once been a shelter for a living creature that carried the world on its back. The walls around the space are paper thin and breakable. Having sent my only daughter off to college, and entered middle age, I feel the fragility and weight of the vacancy, too.
“It’s rare to find them intact like this,” the man says.
“I guess this is our night,” I reply.
His laugh sounds like a bubbling tide pool. A gust of wind carries the scent of brine into our faces, and he stoops anew, this time unearthing a fragment of a conch, or maybe a scallop.
“You see this one?” he asks.
Its edges are uneven, and its original form is long lost. He places the shell shard in my palm. It is rose-petal pink and glossy on one side, smoothed and sculpted by waves and years. On the other, raised rough lines and ridges, like wrinkles, crisscross the eggshell-white surface. I hand it back to him.
“It’s not as beautiful as the sundial,” I say.
“Then you’re seeing it wrong.”
I tilt my head at him.
“The ocean doesn’t destroy things,” he explains. “It reshapes them.”
I ask him if he was a marine biologist or geology professor. He shakes his head.
“I am a student. The beach is my teacher.”
He hands me the sundial and drops the other back into the sand. I thank him as he walks away. His heels leave divots in the wet sand that vanish in seconds.
Alone, I watch the sun disappear and then set the sundial down, waiting until a pulse of salt water pulls it back to the ocean that has witnessed civilizations rise and fall.
I wonder where it will wash up next and who will marvel at its perfection.
Or, will the sundial break apart and be reshaped by the waves into a piece of something, once whole, but still worth admiring?
Salty air fills my lungs, dissolving the thoughts carried here, at least for now. I watch the tide reach, retreat, always working, and as predictable as time, wrap my ankles again and again, reminding me that some truths remain unchangeable.
I stoop to pick up the shard and slip it in my pocket, running my finger over its imperfect shape until I memorize it.
