The Agony of the Safe and the Happiness of Shells

 

All shells point east on Playa Grande. Not back there yet but tomorrow morning we head out first to Florida and then up to Maryland. House listed, there's been a load of interest in the day it's been listed. Showings start tomorrow. Oh, and fuck Bob. He's still upset I listed it. And the ancient guy doing the appraisal flaked. Still no appraisal 21 days later. While I'm sympathetic to his health plight this is business. Stopped payment on the check this morning. When I told a friend about his terrible fall she said, and I quote "Great, brain damage has entered the room." Poor old guy! I feel bad about it.

Yesterday was the depths of despair and the highest happiness.

First, we finally had the dial on the house safe drilled out and the safe opened. Even as I joked that I didn't know if the safe was filled with expired coupons and old S & H Greenstamps my mother kept saying there was a lot of cash in there. I wasn't expecting much, I figured there might be little or no cash, but I was hoping that the 3 carat garnet and gold necklace I gave her and her wedding rings were in the safe. Nope, just a pile of death certificates and crapola involving her husband's third wife. Go figure. I wasn't wanting the cash, but I did want the necklace I'd given her to remember her by. Yes, I was ranting and extremely disappointed. 

But that faded once I bestowed something on my beloved aunt Chicken Little. Several days before I was cleaning out the master bath when my eyes fell on a large conch shell. My aunt had told me that when I was five and she was eight my grandmother had given me the shell. I remembered that, I just didn't realize at the time that it was one of Chicken's treasures, one of her most prized possessions, that she'd hide and listen to the ocean when times were tough. And they were always tough, she and her mother never got along. I couldn't remember what happened to the shell, but that afternoon in the house my eyes fell on it and I knew it was that shell. I'd had it roughly until Mom kicked me out at 15, and lost track of it. 

I brought it to my aunt, and her reaction was so positive and immediate that I knew it had been beyond the right thing to do. Almost sixty years melted away and she was a happy child again. Suddenly the safe filled with death certificates didn't matter so much, nor did Bob or that poor appraisal guy. 

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