Sometimes pearls, sometimes seaweed:
"Have no mean hours, but be grateful for every hour, and accept what it brings. The reality will make any sincere record respectable. No day will have been wholly misspent, if one sincere, thoughtful page has been written.
Let the daily tide leave some deposit on these pages, as it leaves sand and shells on the shore. So much increase of terra firma. This may be a calendar of the ebbs and flows of the soul; and on these sheets as a beach, the waves may cast up pearls and seaweed."
Henry David Thoreau, 07/06/1840
His musings on seaweed as "a fit invention for Neptune to adorn his car with, or a freak of Proteus" and (with reference to a Longfellow poem) drifting weed as "symbols of those grotesque and fabulous thoughts which have not yet got into the sheltered coves of literature" can be found in his excursion book "Cape Cod" here at (13)... my preference is still better summed up in this more recent bumper sticker from the Cape that uses an additional name to those cited by Thoreau for the weed that shows up every August:
