photo #8925904

"My parents have been married for 47 years, but they’ve hated each other for at least 20. They don’t divorce out of fear of being alone, so they take separate vacations and still pretend to be a team. Dad goes to one beach, Mom to another. They both come back with bags full of shells, as if to prove they really went somewhere. They’ve been collecting those shells for years, stored in boxes under the guest room bed. Nobody looks at them, nobody talks about them—except for a few jabs about who spent more or picked the worse spot. Last summer, Mom had a health scare. Fortunately, nothing serious, but it shook us. And I realized that, deep down, those shells were the only proof that they were still searching for something beautiful, even if not together. So I pulled out all the boxes and sorted the shells by place and year: Myrtle Beach, Cape Cod, Sanibel Island… On the back of each frame, I wrote the place and year, copying Mom’s handwriting from old photo albums. I left some frames empty. You never know, maybe this year they’ll take a trip together. Maybe not. I hung everything in the hallway, where they couldn’t miss it. Dad stood there in silence for ten minutes. Mom cried. She said it was the nicest thing anyone had done for her in years. No, they didn’t fix their marriage. But they’re planning a trip together—the first since I was in high school. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: we all have forgotten objects at the bottom of a box, just waiting for someone to turn them into something that really matters." ❤️ Credit:Scott Callie