Sea Glass Summers

My aunt has a jar of sea glass on every windowsill of her cottage in Maine. She's been collecting it for forty years. This August, I stayed with her for two weeks and finally understood why.

Every morning at low tide, we walked the rocky beach with our heads down, coffee in hand. She taught me what to look for: the frosted green of old soda bottles, the brown of beer bottles, the rare cobalt blue of medicine jars from a century ago. "Red is the rarest," she said. "I've found two in forty years."

It's a slow kind of hunting. You stop talking. You listen to the waves. You notice tiny things: a crab under a rock, the pattern of foam on the sand, the way the light changes on the water.

On my last morning, I found a piece of red glass, worn smooth and round as a coin. I screamed. My aunt ran over, and when she saw it, she whooped so loudly the gulls scattered. "Took me twenty years," she said. I gave it to her. She put it in the jar by her bed.