I brought home from a beach that I’d stopped at, during that trip I’d taken south, a few seashells that I selected from the many that were strewn and half-buried in the heavy, wet sand along which I’d walked, a quarter mile or so, from the place where I’d dropped my backpack and things (after I’d parked my vehicle and had made my way on foot across the lot, to an expanse of shore) that I might wander down to the water, and wade into it, and dive beneath the waves, and swim some, before trudging back up onto land and beginning to look for those shells, while meandering in the direction I’d happened to be facing, as I said I’d done; and now those shells, rinsed of the granules that clung to them, and dry to the touch, are sitting on the sill of a window in an apartment a thousand or so miles from where they recently had been, unaware, I imagine, of the newness of their surroundings, and how they once had been in the ocean, and could easily have remained there, or somewhere on the coast, had I not seen them and picked them up, or had I picked up other ones instead of them.