There’s a pile of calcium carbonate behind me. Grays, taupes, light orange and white, mostly the scalloped kind you see on gas station signs or at least the pieces of them. Cleary they didn’t house those delightful restaurant menu staples we love lightly seared. Or maybe they did. Whatever lived in them hasn’t for awhile and somehow their temporary apartments washed up and settled, a cracked tide line that pushed up the beach and clearly existed at some point, but I haven’t seen it happen in real time yet. 

I want a perfect black one and I had one yesterday but the integrity of my swimsuit pocket failed me and it returned to the gulf. It’s not the kind of shell someone (read:hermit crab) can use, but it’s out there just in case. It could be a cool sea beret for a crab, if it held just the right amount of still. 

There are no shells on the beach in Mississippi. Weird but no less true. Mullet reign supreme and sometimes an errant alligator finds its way out of the brackish bayous, inlets and bays, making the locals assume they crawled out of the drainage pipes that drain into the gulf. The logic to how they got in the pipes reduced to speculative conspiracy theories about flushing baby gators down the toilet and them growing to massive size in the sewerage system to crawl into the gulf to wreak havoc. The overestimation of the Mississippi sewer infrastructure forgotten in lieu of the super gator myth. 

I do miss the gulf. The slightly salty silt water I grew up around. The Coast never feels like the beach and that’s a shame. It’s no less the beach but something about the color of the water makes it a bastard beach child of the clear water just 150 miles East. Fitting for Mississippi, as it’s treated this way a lot. What the Coast loses in sexy it gains in its time slowing feel. If it feels later than 1987 while you’re there, that’s on you. The Coast did it’s part. You fucked it up by bringing whatever garbage you packed. Even if inadvertently. 

I didn’t know the feeling when I was younger but every time I went into Fabian’s, a local souvenir store in Long Beach, MS I felt like something was afoot. These shells didn’t come from here. Why would anyone buy one to commemorate their visit here?  I later learned that this feeling was either irony or sarcastic coincidence. Both feel similar.  The googly eyed mini conch shells looking up from the shelves asking to go home with you. I wonder where all those souvenir shop seashells come from.  I mean today I wonder. I’d never considered it before now.

I read once or at least heard spoken in hushed tones that the Russian or Ukrainian mob controlled all the Souvenir Shops along the Alabama and Florida Panhandle Coasts.  I had noticed the accent I think. If this isn’t true, I wonder how those rumors get started. If it is true I wonder how it goes down. Is there a handbook and training manual for temporary henna tattoos, airbrushing and hair braids that the youth of Ukraine take? Is all that seashell money being sent back to Kiev? I bet those folks sure miss the Russia/Ukrainian summers as the swelter of the Alabama August settles over Surf Style like a wet blanket. 

I picked up a couple shells that could have passed for black but upon further investigation were really a whitish gray. Water made them black, and upon its drying it faded away. 

I didn’t need a scallop house anyway. 

#hugsandhi5s