Last summer we came back from Florida with a bucket full of good-sized, stark white seashells that I let Maris keep to play with.  I found her on our porch the other day mixing paints and asked what she was going to do in a trying-not-to-sound-like-a-wet-blanket motherly voice.  She said she was making me something.  I pushed back the dread of what might have to be cleaned and cheerfully told her I could not WAIT to see.  What she brought me is the most intense combination of tangible love I have ever received.  She painted me seashells:  God’s treasure from the sea and my treasure from God bearing the name “of the sea”.  I marveled at the swirls of different colors as she held them up for my inspection in her small, paint-smeared hands.  “Do you like them, Mama?” she asked.  And suddenly nothing else mattered:  not the paint on her clothes, or in her hair, or on her great-grandmother’s glass table on the porch.  I knew they could all be cleaned.  But this precious gift was made for me.  So unique and such a treasure — just like my daughter.  I have her first two mixed in with some shells that sit on our coffee table.  I found those three beautiful pink conchs in Mexico about two years ago and for me they represent our little family.  Interestingly enough, my mother’s aunt (both passed away now) painted a seashell mobile with shells from the same island for the birth of Princess Grace’s first child.  They were suspended by driftwood and my mother said her aunt framed the handwritten thank you she received from the Princess of Monaco.  I believe they each received a personal gift they both treasured.  English Clergyman Thomas Fuller said, “Memory is the treasure house of the mind wherein the monuments thereof are kept and preserved.”  Every day my angel adds a new treasure in my chest of memories.  And they are beyond measure.  Achukma hoke.