Shutter Sisters

the gift

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Paddling through the Broken Islands we saw mussels as big as footballs and starfish with uncountable legs and bodies as wide as our kayaks. A second sun shone up from the ocean floor, illuminating underwater forests of giant kelp that swayed and entangled, a slick, glowing green.

After a day of chasing whales and surfing bottleneck currents we’d choose a beach on one island or another, pull our boats onshore. Then we’d tuck into cold beer and sit by a fire until rosy, cleansing woodsmoke permeated every pore. Watched by thousand year-old cedars and hemlocks that dwarfed their tiny outposts, with roots like fingertips wrapped around the edge of the sand.

It was in this sand that the skull of the sea otter shone bleached white, part-sculpture and part-ghost. Proud, unapologetic, not a whiff of self-pity. I felt like I’d been singled out to receive this gift.

He lives in the kitchen, a different spot every day for how much I pick him up to feel his prickly smoothness in my hands. He reminds me of that place I escape to in my head—the sound of my bow slicing through swell, of the heat in my arms taking me deeper into the peace of where there are no people.

Show us something precious to you—something unexpected, discovered and clung to as an artifact of some fabulous epic or episode. Let’s get through the February doldrums by sharing a few tall tales, eh?

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Addendum: I should clarify—as great as they are, tall tales are not limited to beach finds. Show us any inanimate object in your home that tells a story—a first edition of a favourite book someone gave you, your mother’s handwritten recipe cards, a vase bought in your adventuring days from a street vendor in some exotic locale. Or maybe just the first macaroni-and-glue artwork given to you by a child. Tell! Show! Anything goes.

Comments

  9. The story: fifth grade, mean teacher, loved art class!
    The object: yellow pinch pot, made in fifth grade art class
    The lesson: As a teacher, I strive to find the "something special" in every one of my students, and never, ever want them to see a mean teacher in me. This artifact of my own educational experience is a reminder to nurture the WHOLE child.

    Thanks for the great story and wonderful idea!

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/23630286@N05/2291728519/

  15. Sea otters are the BESTEST!

    No pictures, but I remember getting lost in the woods once. What a gift that was…just being the the woods, feeling it all around me-how I was alone and yet I wasn’t…

    it was a wonderful gift for a lonely little girl.