Sand dollars found a friend in Luke last week.
“Upon learning the dollar had been stranded too far from shore to save itself, he spent the remainder of the trip throwing every live dollar washed up by the tide back into the sea.”
“Cooked Cookies” continues.
“Junonia”, Sheree Shatsky (2025)
Part 3
To say the family fell in love with the island the day of Luke’s discovery and empathetic mission sounds silly and trite, but indeed love was the simple truth. Perhaps the laziness of the Gulf proved the attraction, the less threatening nature of its ease and merge, lapping an invitation instead of crashing warnings against the shore, a lulling tease of sorts that one could wade with expanse without fear of what lie beyond the darker fathoms. Whenever school and space offered a window of opportunity, they packed into the car and drove the three and a half hours across the state to spend a few days wandering the white sand in search of coquina and jingle and bubble shells and the ever elusive junonia, a creamy mahogany-flecked deep water lovely that rarely washed up on shore. The shell proved so rare a find that island tradition decreed the lucky person discovering the stately beauty stop by the visitor center to have their photograph snapped for the local newspaper.
Good fortune found Mina when she stumbled upon the pride of the island chasing after a missed Frisbee. As the disc lifted and floated out with the fingers of the tide, she trapped it with her foot, nearly stamping on the coveted shell. Mina scooped up the junonia and marveled over her find. The shell was intact, not a chip or a break, the spiral rows of brown and white spots sharp and distinct, not faded like the fragments she often discovered on the beach. It was if a diver had gathered the shell for her to find. Turning the junonia over, she found the body whorl pristine in it’s sculpture, smooth and shiny and inhabited. She took a sniff. The resident sea snail was alive. She placed the junonia on the shoreline and watched it bobble toward the water, only to be washed back in for someone else to find. Grabbing the shell and a sharp piece of driftwood, Mina shucked out the purple mottled snail neat and clean, flinging the body as far out into the water as she could. She rinsed off the junonia and turned to head back, only to see Luke standing behind her, watching. He retrieved the Frisbee beached in a tangle of seaweed and left his sister standing in the surf.
Her photograph appeared in the newspaper the next day. Mina raised the flying disc high, while planting an exaggerated kiss smack on the shell. The underlying caption read “One small step for The Junonia”. After all the traveling back and forth across the state, the two worlds merged as one. The time had come to leave space behind and call the island home. Their father landed a position with a group of engineering consultants on the mainland and his nine to five day gave his family a more predictable life, a life embraced in a stucco home set back off the beach, within sight of the dunes where Sadie found Luke.
***
To be continued …
Read:
Cooked Cookies 1 here.
Cooked Cookies 2 here.
Thank you for reading.