My family likes to plan vacations once or twice every year. Usually we'll have one big vacation each year. One such year my parents decided to take a trip down to Oregon. They found a beach house there and rented it out for an entire week.
The first thing to do when you prepare for a vacation is to go shopping. Oregon has beaches. We should buy sandals and shorts and suntan lotion. Little did we know that beaches can be cold—very cold. We spent our days in the one pair each of long pants we had packed and wore jackets constantly. We did not even bother finding the suntan lotion.
When one is at the beach, they must go collecting randomness on the seashore. My siblings and I found a plethora of broken shells and starfish. One of my favorite past times was to collect sand-dollars. I collected buckets of them and took the treasures home with me—my very own stash of riches! I put them in the cupboard under the bathroom sink and became a seashell collector.
My three siblings and I—encouraged on by my mother (there was no TV) took lots of long walks, around the beaches, around the city we were staying in, around the beaches, around the house, around the beach . . . and so forth. On one of the last days we went to a souvenir shop. We were each allowed one souvenir. I don't remember what I choose to get, but I do remember what one of my brothers decided to get. He choose a small basket full of small seashells and starfish—how silly that seemed. If he could have all the starfish he wanted from the ocean why would he buy them???
When the day finally came that we had to leave our beloved Oregon there was a terrible stench in the bathroom we couldn't get rid of. My mother wandered around the rental house until she discovered my treasure trove of shells.
Do you know that animals live inside of seashells? Small animals that die and go rotten if they are removed from the ocean and kept in beach houses by young girls for a week. How could I know? My mother has a starfish she keeps in the bathroom, all dry and prickly, and brown. I think I intended to start my own sea collection for a bathroom in a house I would not own for many years to come.
However, due to the stench of my many seashells my treasure trove was thrown back to the beach and I was taken home without any of them. My brother's shells however, where kept. When I got home I took up a much better hobby, I began collecting rocks.
I called them lava rocks, they looked like Swiss cheese, blobular and holy. The most common color was a dark red, I collected hundreds of them, along with any other normal gray rocks that I took a fancy to. Every once in a while I would come upon a black or purple lava rock—oh what joy! Back to my collection it went.
I cannot think of a more appropriate place to keep a rock collection then on top of a larger rock. We had a pile of large rocks that bordered a sunken garden at my house, up to the top I climbed, deposited my precious rocks, and climbed down again. Sometimes new rocks would appear in my collection as I could not differentiate between the special rocks I had separated out from all other rocks and the average pebbles that had chipped off of my boulder.
My brothers and I went searching everywhere for rocks to collect. Eventually we decided finding rocks wasn't enough, we had to create them. We attacked the large boulders in our yard, chipping away precious slivers of rock from them to take to our collections. Shortly after our mother commented on how quickly the boulders were weathering.
I also went through a pill-bug phase. When my mother made me go out and help weed the garden I would inevitably end up sitting on the ground turning pill bugs on their backs and watching them curl up and down as they tried to right themselves. It is a delicate art—collecting pill-bugs. If you aren't careful you will loose your horde very quickly. You have to turn them perfectly upside down so that they can't right themselves, then you sit and watch for more while the captured pill-bugs squirm and wriggle. It is very fortunate that children have a short attention span.
Now I make a conscious effort to be less strange. I collect sensible things like books, and movies, and shoes so people will never suspect the level of strangeness I am capable of.
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