A Seashore Strewn with Slippers

What unspeakable joy it was to return to the Cape that I love and this time not by myself, but with two daughters and my two grandchildren.  It doesn’t get much better than that.  We were blessed beyond blessed to be in my friends cottage again, the one that is perfect in every way, small enough to be so intimate, with a wide open view to the small lake in the yard, and every furnishing inside a reflection of the world outside.   A magical cottage in every way.  My granddaughter, who is three, called it the “seashell house’ for really, everywhere you look there are shells.  Shell wreaths, 30 or more Atlantic whelks decorate the fence of the outside shower, horseshoe crab shells greet you at the door.  It’s wonderful, in my granddaughter’s eyes and in mine also.

When I was last here it was fall, and without a granddaughter and grandson in tow, I had gone to the local harbor beach just to look once but didn’t spend any time there.  This time it was the perfect start to each day and the seashell motif is carried over there, with the high tide line being piled high with a zillion or more slipper shells.  Our home was on the other side of the cape on Cape Cod Bay and there you may find a few shells but nothing like this mother load that was present here.  And again, it gets you wondering, how does the sea support such an overabundance of life?

If you are a landlocked person, perhaps you don’t know the “slipper shell”.  It is really a gastropod, a snail as it were, and it is a filter feeder that subsists on phytoplankton and algae.  If you look inside an empty shell you see a “shelf” that in life would support the soft organs of the animal.  It is were the image of a “slipper” comes from.  If we look at their Latin name, Crepidula fornicata, you get the jest that these guys are great at replicating themselves.  And so they are.  They aren’t wanderers of the sea, but just attach to something hard, be it a rock, a horseshoe crab, a whelk, each other orr whatever is handy and from there they can just filter the plankton out of the water. No need to go roaming. 

And to find that special someone?  Well, they are often found in a stack, with the large shells on the bottom being the females, and the smaller ones on top the males.  Sooooo when its time to make even more slipper shells, your true love is nearby.  And if the large female on the bottom dies, than the next male in line will change into a female so that the ratio of “guys to girls” is always a good one.  Neat trick.  

So, food just for the filtering, mates handily available for mating and no predators to speak of and you have the reason the shore is littered with slippers.  However, what they do need, is a quiet harbor, sort of beach, no pounding waves thank you to knock me off my stack and that is why they are just feet deep here but hardly found on other more exposed beaches.

 

No matter the reason they were present, or the life style they lead, my grandchildren were just thrilled to be collecting them by the buckets and using them later in the fabulous fairy houses they would build.  And On the Trail of Fairies has to be another installment for it would become a main theme for much of my trip.  But that will have to wait for later.  Someone is expected to make supper here and I fear it is I. 

*Authors note- Sadly, on the very first day at the beach, on the very first visit, I was squatting down with my grandson in the water when my camera just “plooped” out of my pocket and into the briny sea, sadly these are the only pictures I have!