Childhood Memories and a Horseshoe Crab

When my husband and I first moved into our new apartment, we would give the following directions to people who wished to find us:

"Walk most of the way down the block and stop when you see the two windows with the Horseshoe crab shell in front. That's us. If you yell up, we'll hear you and let you in."

Now that it's getting dark earlier, we've decided that it might be more useful to simply give the address and apartment number.

But the horseshoe crab shell is still there, along with another, smaller crab shell and three clam shells that sit wistfully on the window ledge like the echo of a long ago trip to the beach. The clam shells have been bleached almost white by the sun while the larger of the two crab shells has a few distinctive white patches that seem to have gotten there by means of pigeon. The smaller (and more intact) crab shell looks out at the street below and I half expect that, one day, it will finally get bored with the view from my window ledge and wander off.

Granted, if they ever left, I would be even more puzzled by where they went than by how they got there in the first place. I'd always assumed that the tenants who occupied this apartment before us had at least one small child and, one summer day, they took this child all the way out to the beaches on the Long Island Sound. And this child probably spent a little while building sand mounds and calling them castles, then finally built up the courage to dip a toe into the ever-freezing waves of the Atlantic. Half an hour of shrieking and running to and fro later, he or she would actually be far enough in the water that it would cover a pair of chubby knees.
Assuming, of course, that this child was anything like me the first time I went to the beach. And I'm assuming he or she was...because of the clam shells; three large, unchipped, almost pure white clam shells of the sort that I (and my sister and my friends) would spend hour after hour combing the beaches to find. We usually discovered about two really fine ones per week. The rest were either broken or tiny or stained black.

We used to paint the shells too, with our little watercolor sets that, like play-doh, started out as a rainbow of colors and ended up varying shades of mud. We painted stars and butterflies and suns and anything else that required very little in the way of artistic ability and then begged our parents to be allowed to sell them on the boardwalk. Our parents, wise as they are, recognized that our work had much in the way of sentimental value, though little of any other sort, and so offered to buy the biggest and prettiest ones themselves for the princely sum of an ice cream cone or a few quarters to spend in the arcade playing foos-ball with as much energy and skill as we had devoted to painting shells.

I wonder what happened to all those badly painted butterflies.

I wonder what happened to the shells outside my window to have brought them here. Were they the biggest and nicest of all the shells found that day, the special three allowed to come home as mementos of an exciting excursion and left out on the window ledge to keep sand and seawater out of the house?

How long have they been out there? Clearly long enough for them to have been forgotten and given to a new owner, along with the apartment. I'm tempted to leave them out there when we move, assuming they survive that long, but what if the next tenants don't appreciate having a horseshoe colony at their window? What if they don't understand how important the size and purity of the shells are?

There is, however, an alternative. A Michael's Craft Store just opened down the street from me and I rather think that the time has come for me to have a new set of watercolors.