The Conch Shell

My mother possessed this large conch shell for as long as I can remember. This shell would be a door stop much of the time for their bedroom door, through all of the many homes she set up house in. Earlier this year I visited my mother and asked her about this conch shell as I did not remember anything else about it other than it presence in our house, and don't recall questioning its origin. I remember holding it up to my ear often to hear the ocean roar, particularly when we lived in towns far from the ocean. That’s what we believed anyway as children. The story of the conch shell was a family one that I had not yet heard, and I do not believe my mother had told often.


When my mother was a young girl in New Haven, Nova Scotia (Cape Breton), she used to clean house for her paternal great Aunt Em. This would be back in the early 1950s or so and my mother was paid five cents for her work back then. Great Aunt Em wore long black dresses with lace collars and long boots that laced up with hooks instead of eyelets. The black dresses came right to the floor. Aunt Em was believed to have been born in Newfoundland well before confederation, as in before Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949. My maternal grandfather, John was born in Petites, Newfoundland. Great Aunt Em was completely blind and would feel the edge of the coins she handed to my mother to determine which coin it was.


While my mother was cleaning Aunt Em’s house, she would often pick up the large white conch shell and put it to her ear to hear the ocean, as children often do. Aunt Em came to realize with her unseeing eyes, just how much my mother liked the conch shell. During one visit to Great Aunt Em's house, she gifted the large white conch shell to my mother. I still remember this shell clearly. I often picked up that conch shell and listened to the ocean. It was the same ocean my mother heard.


My mother said when she brought the shell home with her, my grandmother took it from her. Then she clarified that she had taken it into their “playhouse” which was piled lumber my grandfather had cut. My Aunt Judy and my mother played out there. My grandmother did not think it safe out there so brought it into the house where it stayed until one year my mother was there with her siblings, sorting through my grandmother’s things, trying to pare down the stuff that accumulates when you spend your entire married life in the same house. The dessert dishes could be divided between the three sisters, but the conch shell was coming home with my mother.

A few weeks ago, my own mother’s health is failing, and she needed to move most of her things on, I asked for the conch shell and the story that went with it. When it arrived two days ago, having been brought to me by my daughter who attended her funeral on Saturday. I held it to my ear and listened to the ocean my mother heard more than sixty years ago.