| Your story reminds me of a summer memory. My parents used to send each of us girls to Biloxi by ourselves, to spend a week or two with the grandmothers. One grandmother lived across the bay in D'Iberville, which may have had one stoplight at the time. Her house was right on the Back Bay, and she had a pier we could fish and crab from, and a little skiff tied up we could go out in. In the summer, when the water gets brackish, the jellyfish come into the bay, and at night they glow in the dark, a ghostly greenish phosphorescence like fireflies. There are two kinds, sea nettles, that look like pink umbrellas, and sting you if you touch the tail, and what we called sea eggs, that are small and round and whitish clear and don't sting. One night I caught dozens of sea eggs, and collected them in my Keds because I didn't have any other container. Then I carried them back to my grandmother's house so she could appreciate them shining in the dark. She made me leave my shoes outside on the steps, and the next day, when the sun came up, the jellyfish rotted very quickly and my shoes were ruined and I had to wear some of hers for the rest of the visit, but that was OK because I was very tall and my feet were big. |
