Dead Stuff From the Sea

We just got back from staying with my grandparents for a couple of days in Florida, where Ella spent her vacation collecting shells.  Lovely shells of all shapes, sizes and colors.

Addison spent hers collecting dead things from the sea.  And she couldn’t have been prouder of each dead, rotting treasure she pulled from the shore.  Here are some of the highlights.

Day 1 was sea weed–good old fashioned sea weed, which she flung into the surf and retrieved time and time again.

It was on day two that she found the treasure that would haunt us with its pungent odor and bizarre texture for the remainder of our vacation.

Addison dubbed her find her “cantaloupe.” It was some sort of a fleshy wad (it had a disturbing amount of give without being actually mushy) of former-life–perhaps a whale liver or, more likely, a no longer living conch–that had some sort of long sharp object–fish spine?–sticking through it, a fact that was likely closely related to the thing’s non-livingness.

Most people, upon happening across this abomination of nature, would either go out of their way to avoid it, or check it out then fling it the hell back in the sea, but not Addison.  She lovingly toted her “cantaloupe” back to the house with us, where it spent the night in the garage, only to be paraded proudly back to the beach with us the next morning.  It smelled delicious.

Day 3:  While Ella collected a bucketful of bean clams of beautiful colors and patterns, Addison took the cantaloupe on a walk and filled her bucket with an assortment of dead things, including various not-attached-to-each-other crab parts and a stinky unidentified red thing.  Also included was a hunk of glass.

When we went back down to the beach to see the sunset that night, Addison had another find:

Ta da!  We tossed it back before leaving, but couldn’t convince her to leave the cantaloupe behind.

Day 4 was spent lovingly burying and unburying the cantaloupe in the sand and offering it to us for breakfast and then lunch alongside an accompaniment of other beach things that were once alive.  At the end of the afternoon it was smelling more than ripe and we convinced her it was time to return the cantaloupe to the ocean because we were leaving the next day (Addison: “So it can come back alive?” Us: “Ummm, mayyyybe…”).  We said good-bye and tossed it back from whence it came.  That was low tide…

We went back down to the beach for the last time to see the sunset that night, and I’ll be damned if she didn’t find that thing again down by the shore.  There is absolutely no doubt it was the same “cantaloupe” with the same pointy spiny thing sticking out of it.  It must have washed back up at high tide while we were eating dinner.  Addison was overjoyed to be reunited with it, as was the expired sand crab she also found.

That night Addison ran in circles of joy with the crab in one hand and her cantaloupe in the other.  I have never seen her so excited.

After all that, I had to let her bring it back to the house again to spend its last night in the garage.  I’m certain she dreamed about it–as did we all, as the odor wafted up through the floor.

I opened the garage door to pack up the car at 4 am the next morning only to find a raccoon munching away on Ad’s gift from the sea.  It was time to say good-bye for real.  Steve and I said our final farewells and chucked the cantaloupe as far as we could into the lake behind my grandparents’ house, where Addison, on a canoe trip, will undoubtedly be reunited with it next year.