The Truth of a Junonia (excerpt from a memoir)

The Truth of a Junonia (excerpt from a memoir) by Paula Michele Bolado

As soon as the waves pulled back, thousands of rainbow-colored coquina shells glittered orange and gold along the shore before quickly burrowing back into the sand. While watching my son dig at the sand and shells, I remembered at his age what it felt like to scoop the tiny coquinas which wriggled down into my palms. Holding coquinas in his own hands, Aiden laughed at the feeling. His slim, four-year old body was covered from head to toe in white sand and broken shells. Highlighting his smiling face were the colors of the beach—a perfect creation as if the sea itself had formed him from water and sand.

He asked me to dig a hole with him. I sat beside him, just us, on our vacation—without any other family. Here on Sanibel Island, as the sun started to set, all we needed were the sand, the water, the shells, and each other: mother and child.

Shells covered the beachscape in patchy blankets of tans and creams. We dug our toes in the soft, damp silt of the beach and watched the sandpipers dance along the shore. As we scooped away at our hole, Aiden noticed an olive shell beside my toes. This type of tulip snail is olive-shaped, glossy, with a brownish-grey exterior and an undulating perfect whorl shaping a pink pointed tip, and lastly speckled with spots of black. I had never seen such an olive shell before.

“How are shells made?” My son asked.

“Well,” I started, thinking carefully how to say this: “They are formed from the animal inside, giving it protection in the Gulf, where currents and predators could harm its life. As the animal grows, so does the shell it carries. In order to house its increasing size, the animal adds more layers to the shell as time goes on.” My son nodded while he turned the shell around in his hand, the sun glinting off the enamel. All my years as a shell fair kid on Sanibel paid off in this moment. The shell in my son’s hand had been through some challenges; we observed the scratches along its back and the small hole that penetrated its hard exterior. Such a hole, as small as it was, could make the entire shell vulnerable to predators. “I’m sure the animal here tried to fix its house.”

Aiden picked it up. The spots on this olive shell reminded me of the junonia from the same tulip snail species but more rare. My mother and I spent years combing the beach for the junonia. This palm-sized, thick-shelled gastropod, ringed with large, giraffe brown spots normally lives off-shore, but on rare occasions, it washes to the beach as an empty vessel. The residents of Sanibel Island prized it for its rarity, its beauty, and the adventure in finding one. My mother never wanted to buy the shell, even though it could be bought; rather, the junonia was something to discover.

The rare junonia shell is usually found after a powerful storm. Out of the quarter of a million different types of shells washed up along Sanibel’s coast, the junonia is the most valuable and finding one is a gift. Such a gift from the sea always comes at the end of an evolutionary cycle of the shell’s life; from the animal to a speck of sand, to a chamber of beauty, to the death of the creature, to spinning around in a storm’s raging waters, until finally the junonia is exposed as a gemstone along the shoreline and ends up in the hands of a woman looking for a sign. My mother found that shell on her own one day and she believed it was a redemptive sign, as she was a single mother before she met my step-father.

The name of the junonia shell refers to the Roman Goddess Juno, protector of the well-being of women. As an immortal being, Juno is depicted as a woman of majestic size and beauty. She appears in Shakespeare’s last play The Tempest, as queen of the god’s, and her name is used in the movie, Juno, which is about a girl going through pregnancy alone. I thought about those things, about Juno, the junonia shell, my mother who had passed away years before, and looked to Aiden, who was still digging into the sand with the olive shell tucked into his pocket. My marriage was ending at the time and I was going to be a single mother; the stigma hovered over me like an ominous gulf storm. But it was something I had needed to do, as I had a hole in my own shell created by an emotionally abusive husband that I needed to repair. There were dark days ahead for us, but at the moment, I was present with my son, contemplating the beauty and strength that shells withstand as they tumble out of the ocean and into our palms as keepsakes.

After the divorce and graduate school, I kept that olive shell and others like it nearby, especially the ones with holes, because they represent how even the strong are vulnerable and the need to repair our own holes to live life beautifully.