Listen my lovelies, I have a wonderful story for you. Have you seen this image before? It was taken on the eastern coast of England, at a remote beach in Suffolk just across the North Sea from the Netherlands.
It was here that two old friends first came to visit in 2005. Els and Lida had been close childhood friends in the Netherlands, but as they grew older and had families, they had mostly fallen out of touch. Some forty years later, they found themselves reunited after both received breast cancer diagnoses within weeks of one another. Upon completing their treatments, they rented a cottage in this tiny village of just forty residents to heal and walk the beach together.
After one such walk, they sat down on the pebbly sand and emptied their pockets of the shells they had picked up along the way. As the two women chatted, they began to place their white whelks in a line. They didn't spell out their names, nor make smiley faces (or a horrified face), just a simple line, one shell after another. On each of their remaining walks, they'd stop and add a few more. The holiday ended, and the two vowed to return every six months to ostensibly check on their line ... perhaps more to check on each other? READ MORE
