About

Dear Celia,

Like you, I too am a Shell Girlie, though my shell collection did not survive my family’s déplacement. You and I, the seeds of uprooted trees, we collect for posterity. But absent return, absent record, how do we compose genealogy? When you set out to wrest your family history from your father—I know your pain when you plead, why won’t you share with me?—you sought beyond his archive’s peripheries. What about all of the things that make a life a life—these not-posed and not-arranged relics of lives lived?

You could compose genealogy from still life: by asking your father to shell …