Beach Bauble Bounty In St. Barts

Tantalizing beltline of perfect shells on St. Barts aptly named
Shell Beach.

Jillions of jewels – which I had.  Creepy crawlers – which my brother had.  Easy-bake ovens – I envied my neighbor’s.  We did not entirely keep up with the Jones, or the Woolcinskis, in that case.  Nor did we own an automatic dishwasher then, to the horror of the folks who bought our home.

For context… shells were small, but still stunning.  Sigh…
my feet have not yet returned to this state of
cleanliness since their Saba mud slathering
(click here to read about that).

Those of you in my age bracket understand that giddy era.  It was back when kids were encouraged to play with scalding hot metal devices to create all sorts of useless crap.  Back in the era before we flooded our homes with cheap Chinese… everything… it wasn’t that uncommon to spend much more making it yourself – for fun!  Dangerous chemicals for home use were in vogue…. Like Dad’s home-made fiberglass van camper shell conversion, which grossly overstayed its welcome during its construction phase in our garage.

Even for non-shell-hunters, St. Barts Shell Beach is
a great beach to play at.  Boats were anchored, but a bit rolly.

Ah… but Mom will undoubtedly take a trip back on memory lane with the word… Lucite.  Despite that 70s craze, and mom’s shell-embedded molded lucite trivets and other craft knick-knacks (fortunately she did not follow the toilet seat making trend), we were unable to make a dent in the boxes and boxes of shells.  We’d collected the shells – cowries, coffebeans, olive shells, coral tubes, sand dollars, sea urchins -- over the years of low-tide beachcombing at LaJolla’s Shell Beach.  Not sure what hapless soul finally took them off our hands.

Okay, I did take a few more than these.  But not many!  Honest!

In spite of, or perhaps because of those precious childhood memories, I find myself incapable of passing up the treasure trove of nature’s bounty at Shell Beach, St. Barts.  Mostly, though, I looked, and took pictures, and only about a dozen small shells. Okay, a little more than a dozen, but not many more.