When I lived with all of my family members as a child, we used to live near Dadaepo beach in a big port city called Busan, South Korea. Our house was so close to the beach that we could actually see what people were doing on the beach. Glowing sunrays reflected on the waves, people surfing and tanning, and giggles of little children. Among all these things I remember about the wonderful place I lived in, seashells are the core, spatial elements of my childhood memories with no doubt. According to the scientific definition, a seashell is "the calcareous shell of a marine mollusk or similar marine organism." When people are asked to think of seashells, they come up with pastel-pink-colored cones with spirals where crabs take a rest. Seashells, however, mean more than just a passing crab's home to me. As mentioned earlier, because my family lived close to the beach, we often took a walk there and had some family "quality time." Enticed by the sparkles of the seashells, my sisters and I collected the prettiest seashells as we could. To my parents, they all looked the same; however, to the little girls, who were not even ten years old, subtle differences seemed big. .
After collecting them, there was another step to go through: sorting out the seashells once again. Not much effort was required in this stage because most of them had already been assorted in the first step. Then we made necklaces out of the seashells for all family members. Because the seashells were not that thick, we could prick holes easily by gently pressing the seashells with a needle. My dad, however, always pricked holes for us because he thought it was too dangerous for us to do it by ourselves. Then we ran a thread through the pierced seashells and connected them altogether. We did not know how to make a knot, so we had to ask our grandmother for help. Once we finished making each necklace, it was our grandmother's job to finish up everything with a knot.
