…that I got a toilet seat for Christmas one year and it was the best present that I got that year?
Hang on… I need to add some context and back story to this. That opening sentence is not meant to be sad and depressing. That toilet seat really was the gift that made me the happiest that year.
O.k., so, when I was in high school, my mom was mildly obsessed with seashells. My grandparents had moved to Ft. Myers, Florida around the time I was in middle school. The first time my mom went to Sanibel Island with them, she fell in love with all the shells she found on the beach. Which, if you’ve ever been to Sanibel Island, you know there’s practically more shells than there is sand on the beach. In fact, there is a whole seashell museum on the island. True story. I’ve been there.
This picture of Sanibel is not A.I. There really are that many seashells on the beach.
Over the course of my years in high school, I went to Florida a LOT. Sanibel Island, a LOT. At some point, my mom got the idea that she was going to open a seashell business. She wanted to make those tacky seashell souvenirs that you find in beach shops. Refrigerator magnets, figurines, pretty much anything you could think of…made with seashells and stamped with the name of the beach on it.
Long story short, she was successful in this business venture. With her name being Cindy, “Cindy’s Seashells” was born. My parents enclosed the screened in porch of our house and made it her workshop. After a while, that became their full time job. They got a wholesale license and began selling their handmade souvenirs to shops all up and down the east coast.
In order to make these items, they had to buy the seashells in bulk. Enter the Shell Factory.
You seriously need to Google this place. It was a huge store of nothing but seashell themed items. There was an arcade and bumper boats and a waltzing waters show at night. It was something else. It also had a warehouse for vendors like my mom who could purchase huge bags of seashells for whatever their business was. Needless to say, every trip to Florida, usually involved a visit to the Shell Factory. Sadly, I see that it’s closed now, but just looking at the pictures online makes me feel the nostalgia.
On one of the visits, I saw a wall of seashell toilet seats. And me, being the quirky teenager I thought I was, I fell in love. I thought it was a weird idea but oh how neat they were! To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I found these pictures online. Surprisingly, there’s a lot of places you can buy these now. Who knew?
I really wanted one! I didn’t share a bathroom with anybody at home, so I really wanted to be as dorky as I could with it and this toilet seat would have been perfect! But, these things were well over a hundred dollars. According to the internet, they still are apparently. I had not yet started my lucrative career at Dairy Queen, so I basically had no money to splurge on one of these amazingly unique toilet accessories.
One year, we spent Christmas in Florida with my grandparents, who, unbeknownst to me, had taken notice of my admiration of this unique seashell bathroom creation. After all of the presents had been opened on that Christmas Day, they put one last box on my lap. It was flat and it was heavy. They stepped back and then pointed a camera at me.
I don’t have that picture, but just imagine, if you will, the look on my face when I opened that box to reveal my very own authentic Shell Factory seashell adorned toilet seat. Oh my gosh! It ranks up there with the greatest gifts of all time. No sarcasm at all. I was absolutely thrilled with it.
Sadly, the toilet seat did not survive high school. I mean, it did, but when my parents got divorced and our house got foreclosed, my mom moved out and a lot of things got left behind. If memory serves, the toilet seat actually started to break where the hinge was connected in the back. So I think maybe my mom replaced it before she left for good. If not, the new owners got a nice surprise when they saw that bathroom. They may not have used the word “nice” to describe it, but oh how I did!
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