A pandemic Valentine

Or, how I've whiled away the hours, waiting to see my family again...

One of the “sailors Valentines” I created from (mostly) Florida shells to create holiday gifts for my siblings..

After posting the other day about my growing obsession with collecting sea shells — which has been fueled by pandemic-driven daily walks on Lido, a beach renourishment project that’s dredged up a plethora of new specimens and my strong innate hunter/gatherer instinct — a few readers asked what it is I do with what I’ve collected.

Given that this newsletter format allows me the freedom to veer much farther afield than I could as a metro newspaper columnist (note how I cleverly included enough descriptors in my introduction to the content of “Carrie’s Chronicles” to allow me to write about anything I want), I thought I’d answer that question in today’s post.

The photo above is one of several “sailor’s Valentines” I created over the past 10 months to give as Christmas presents to my siblings. Showing them to friends, I was surprised to learn how many people had never heard of this vintage art of arranging small shells in a geometric mosiac within an octagonal frame, which evolved in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as gifts sailors brought home to loved ones after long voyages at sea.

While the romantic and old-told fable is that the sailors themselves collected and arranged the shells during downtime on their maritime journeys, then framed them in an octagonal compass instrument box to bring home to their wives and lovers, the reality is that most of these “valentines” were crafted in Barbados, where the women of the islands formed a cottage industry and sold their conchylomania (shell collecting) artwork as souvenirs.

The original antiques — which sometimes have a central piece of scrimshaw, an elaborate petaled shell floral design, or a message spelled out in tiny shells —can now sell for thousands of dollars, though there are many others more modern (and less authentic) for less, and even retail “kits” for those who want to skip the collecting and designing.

An antique sailor’s Valentine from Nantucket, with a scrimshaw (etching on whale bone) center. I inherited this piece from my parents, who had a home on the island for decades.

The vintage versions were often found on America’s Northeastern coast, especially in whaling ports like Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard (off the coast of Massachusetts). I first learned of them when my parents bought a home on Nantucket in the ‘70s and it became an annual summertime vacation spot. My mother was an antique enthusiast, and she purchased the valentine you see above, which I inherited after both my mother and father died in 2009.

Another of my “non-traditional” sailor’s Valentines.

Obviously, my own efforts (pictured above and below) are much more rudimentary and my shell assortment considerably more limited. But I found the hypnotic process of arranging the patterns and gluing the shells in place — often accomplished during long evenings when my writing brain was weary and my thoughts lingered on family far away — to be surprisingly calming and soothing.

Like those sailors must have felt when they set anchor in a faraway port at dusk and gazed at the stars, thinking of those they missed, during the past 10 months I’ve felt painfully estranged from ones I hold most dear. These projects allowed me to channel my longing and hurt into something tangible, beautiful, even reassuring. Every shell I glued in place represented a memory, a laugh, a picture or a conversation and brought them vividly back to my mind, if not into my arms.

I look at my burgeoning shell collection today and wonder how much bigger it will become until the day I’ll be able to visit my family again. I know I’m not alone in having plunged headlong into a new hobby or endeavor as a way to channel and dissipate my frustrations during the pandemic — one friend has become a world-class sourdough bread baker; another has turned to Native American beadwork; a third creates baby quilts with stitches so tiny they look like a marching line of sugar ants. We channel our emotional hunger into our fingers and the result feeds us— literally or figuratively — until we can fill our souls again with what we’re really craving.

A portion of my shell collection. I inherited the custom-made shelf and a lovely assortment of exotic shells from my sister’s in-laws, who’d sailed through much of the Caribbean in their younger years. Each of the drawers pulls out to allow for maximum storage.