Several summers ago my wife and I spent a week's vacation on the island of Korcula in Croatia. We had rented a room in a villa on the sea and most every morning I went down to the beach to sit in one of a pair of lounge chairs to have my morning coffee. Some mornings my wife joined me there and other mornings she slept in until later in the morning.
But Sonya was always there before I arrived, walking our shared alcove in bare feet and a printed summer dress, her thin legs stepping carefully across the stone beach as she searched for small treasures among the stones that she would gather up in one hand as she progressed across the beach: sea urchins slowly drying out in the low tide, bits of colored broken glass tumbled and polished in the surf and stones for untold years.
One morning as I finished up my coffee and put down my newspaper, eighteen-year-old Sonya approached me with a gift.
"It is maybe unpleasant, Robert, but I believe you will like it," she said in her best English. She held out her hand, and in her palm crawled a large snail with a beautiful multicolored shell atop it. "Do you want to hold it?" She pressed her hand toward mine without any chance for me to decline the offer.
"Well, yes, what a beauty it is!" I said as I took it onto my own palm.
"What antlers it has!" Sonya said, and then hesitated. "Antlers is right?"
"Yes, they can be called antlers," I said, "but I think a better word is tentacles."
"Ew - really? Tentacles? Like an octopus?" She shuddered a little at the thought.