On Sunday we went again to our urchin collecting place. I think I could go that same road a thousand times and see and share with you different things. This time, it is spring, the season that only lasts a couple of weeks, here. Short, mild, stormy winters are followed, almost without transition, by very long, scorching summers.
Spring is like a dream, what comes and goes in a blink, covering the earth with wild flowers and perfuming the air. A couple of more days, and only the dry, red earth and the trees will remain. Enjoy with us this fragile, ephemeral beauty!
This little guy didn’t like being picked up, but never stopped munching.
Several people have asked us if we kill the urchins that we use for our jewelry. We don’t, it wouldn’t even have occurred to us to kill something to make adornments with it. We find them on the shore, where the waves deposit them, and the ants clean them for us. Only the shells remain, and that we use.
I think that only killing for food is justified, and even then…I have and early remembering to share in that field: I am born and raised in Madrid, but a summer I was for a fortnight in the village of my grandmother, somewhere in the Spanish high plateau. A young woman in the house of relatives where I was staying, was commissioned to kill a chicken for dinner. The young woman, finding herself not quite up to the task, ordered me, nine years old, to hold on to the chicken’s legs. Too well brought up to refuse, but horrified, I held the legs of the poor squealing thing, while the woman saw inexpertly away at the neck.
No…I wouldn’t kill a sea urchin, rest assured.
This time, we found seven sea urchins of a species that in the ten years that we have been visiting this beach, had never seen before. We don’t know if there is a global warming induced migration, or if a freakish wave brought them here just this one time. They will become very, very unique rings, though.
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