Left Behind

Because one must have something to do after the landfill--and after the sweet high school boy who helped me stack my recyclable cardboard and asked if I needed any help, which I didn't--Radar and I packed ourselves into the car and went to the park. He enjoys the children, the smells, the geese, and what the geese leave behind.

While navigating the pine trees and fallen branches, I found two clam shells, pearl-side-up, in the grass. I had never noticed this in prior visits to the lake, but as we continued to walk, we found shells everywhere. Since I feel confident that clams cannot climb the kinds of hills on which we found the shells, I presume birds have been lifting them out of the water, dropping them, and eating the soft parts out. I don't know why it felt so foreign to find them, but I was transported to some other place entirely. Given how things have been recently, it was lovely to forget where I was or ought to be for a moment.

Although I know that technically it's the remnant of something that lived once, its shining bones, I stuffed a shell in my pocket and took it home, where it now sits beside me, glimmering and welcome.