Letters

As schoolchildren in a one-room country school in Wisconsin, back in 1936-1944, we were to commit to memory poetry by such greats as Oliver Wendell Holmes. This poem was very difficult for me to learn, as I really did not understand it—but now I do! I had not thought about this poem since graduating from eighth grade. As I read it through, I realized I had such a shell in my son's shell collection. There it was—the "lustrous coil" shining among the others. As I held it in my hand, feeling the smooth surface, I was taken back to our Feast in St. Petersburg in 1976, where this shell collection first began. My son, Todd Snyder, "left his outgrown shell" in 1999 at age 33.