Prologue: All the people in the following story have since died, so I was sure the story had died (along with my embarrassment) with them. However, at the last family gathering one of my cousins asked if anyone remembered Dell’s shell story. Many did, so since the story is well known in our family, I might as well share it with you. It goes like this …

Our ranch house sat in the middle of the central Arizona desert a few miles from Gilbert, Arizona. Our nearest neighbor lived a mile or so down the road and both houses were surrounded by desert as far as the eye could see. My grandmother and ten year old aunt lived with Daddy, Mama and me. I was nine.

One chilly, rainy, winter day, Mama and Daddy said they couldn’t do much work around the ranch, so they drove into town for supplies. Grandma stayed home with us girls.

We finished up our chores and sat in our front room, not far from the heat of the big wood stove. Grandma turned on the radio so she could listen to “Portia Faces Life.” As she listened, she knitted.

Nearby, my aunt and I lay on our stomachs, rubbing broken crayons across pictures in a fat coloring book. From time to time, I glanced out the window at the pounding rain.

It was a typical rainy day until a strange man walked through the front door.

“What are you doing here?” Grandma demanded.

The man muttered something I couldn’t understand. The man was drunk. Very drunk. Falling down drunk. He smelled bad and dripped rainwater on the throw rug that lay inside the front door. Mama wouldn’t like that.

“GET OUT, NOW!” Grandma yelled. When Grandma yelled everybody paid attention. She stood up, her knitting still clutched in her hands.

The man muttered again. In the background, the theme music from “Portia Faces Life” swelled and faded.

Grandma threw her knitting at him—yarn, needles, and all. The man ducked and ran outside. She rushed forward, pushed the door shut and locked it.

Moments later, we heard the back door open. My aunt screamed. I ran to Grandma.

Daddy’s shotgun hung on hooks on the wall, right next to the 1945 calendar. Grandma snatched it down. She looked right in my eyes.

“HAND ME THAT GUN,” she yelled.

I stared. She already had the gun in her hand!

"NOW, HAND ME THE SHELLS.” Why was she yelling? Grandma only yelled when she was mad. My heart pounded so hard I thought it would pop right out of my chest.

“GRANDMA, WE DON’T HAVE ANY SEA SHELLS,” I yelled back.

I watched Grandma load the shotgun. She ran toward the back door, the gun in her hands. I followed Grandma so closely that anyone watching would have thought I was appliquéd to her skirt.

The man stood on the porch soaked from head to foot. I could see where he had slid around on muddy feet. When he saw Grandma, he fled. He fell two more times before he got to the road. He was still running when Grandma closed the back door and locked it.

“We don’t have any SEA shells?” Grandma stared down at me with disbelief and mischief shining from her brown eyes. She burst out laughing. “SEAshells.” She didn’t stop laughing all afternoon.

Epilogue: Not until I heard Grandma re-telling the story when my parents came home, did I learn that by yelling she had hoped to scare off the intruder without needing to face him gun in hand. Daddy went out to search for the man and found him asleep in a car nose-down in a wash. The man wasn’t sure how his car ended up there, but he definitely remembered an old woman who took after him with a shotgun and some kid who was yelling about seashells. Daddy got out the tractor and pulled the guy’s car back up onto the road and sent him on his way. Poor man, he was just looking for a little help, but he ended up giving my family a great story to tell and re-tell over the years.

Rev. Dell Smith Klein writes from her home in the Weaver Mountains of Arizona. dell@smithklein.net