Two Starfish

Two Starfish

This was the first year that my family did not celebrate Christmas together in my parents’ home in Douglas, Massachusetts. Instead, on Christmas day, my mother, my father, my little sister, my husband, and I boarded a plane at the Worcester airport for Orlando. For two days, we visited my sister, Aimee, who lives in Gainesville, before we all headed up to St. Augustine to stay at a beach house for the rest of the week.

Although the weather and water temperature did not encourage swimming, I did walk along the water everyday, the sun shining down. I like to look down as I walk, searching for shells and beach glass. Childishly, I make a game of it, trying to find the largest or smoothest or strangest sea shell. Luck for me, my husband enjoys competition in any form, and happily walked beside me, trying to beat me in each category. We especially like the shells with holes in them, telling ourselves we could make shell necklaces (but we never do).

On our last full day in St. Augustine, we walked several miles down the beach. On the way back, I used my superstrength softball arm, to save several hermit crabs cowering in their shells from the frantically squawking seagulls looking hungrily on. Suddenly, my husband stopped and shouted for me to look at he sea find. He poked at a starfish. It was purple and outlined in a creamy yellow color and was a little bit larger than his hand.

It didn’t move. “Aw, esta morto. It’s dead,” I mourned.

He wanted to know if we could take it home. Envisioning the decay of all living matter, I said, no. We laid the starfish back in the sand and I went to wash my hands in the cleansing ocean waves. Leaning over, I saw an identical, if somewhat smaller starfish. This one too, seemed dead.

Wanting to capture their beauty, even in death, my husband put both starfish in the sand, told me to place my foot between them, and snapped a photo with the camera on his phone. We could almost pretend they were resurrected. Giving the two invertebrates a burial at sea, we walked back to the beach house, our bittersweet find captured forever.