Shell Hunting

Kathryn Jones

June 20, 2021

Padre Island in summer, 

white foam ruffles on green waves, 

pink ruffles on my swimsuit and bonnet,

smells of seaweed and suntan lotion.

My mother held my tiny hand. Jump!

she said as we waded into the surf. 

She lifted me above the waves.

She gave me a plastic bucket and shovel

for scooping shells we found. Later

she taught me the names: Angel Wing,

Shark’s Eye, Calico Scallop, Sundial,

and my favorite, Lightning Whelk, 

state shell of Texas, open on the left side.

She said, you can hear the sea. 

Years later, the memory pulls at me 

like the moon pulls tides. She is not there

to lift me over the waves now. I remember 

the names of all the shells that fill 

a clear glass vase on my desk. The whelk

rests on top like a crown, and I hear

my mother’s voice floating on the sea.

Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016). Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and in the upcoming Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast (Lamar University Press). She is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.