Sea Glass Hunting

The summer is over but Anouk and I have still made a point to hit the beach at least once a week in September and October. I love the beach in autumn; beaches change with the seasons, too, and fall is especially pretty with the pines dropping needles and the goldenrod in the dunegrass coming into bloom. When we come home we're chilly and cozy and reinvigorated -- and we usually have a handful of sea glass to show off for our efforts.

Autumn is a great time of year for sea-glass hunting -- the weather is cooling down, the beaches are beginning to empty, and storms are churning up the coast, stirring everything up. Prime sea glass hunting weather. Some people chart the tides and the phases of the moon to find the best times for collecting sea glass, others bring special equipment to pan for glass in the shallows. Anne and I just walk and see what we see, which is usually a good enough tactic.

There is an art to looking for sea glass and A. has it. She can spot even the tiniest shards of color in the tide line. Of course, because sea glass is really just glass, it can be sharp, so she knows not to touch it until I've examined it and pronounced it OK. She just calls out the color and I come over to check out what she's found. If it's smooth enough and frosted enough, the glass goes into our bucket. If it's still sharp and only a little cloudy, we toss it back into the water. The waves will smooth it a little more and it will wash up for somebody else, sometime later. That's the Tao of sea glass hunting -- if it's not for you, it's not for you. Move on.



The beaches around Hampton Roads are great for sea glass, because of their proximity to shipping lanes, factories, and colonial-era settlements. So there is always another lovely frosted glass shard or smooth piece of pottery to find and bring home and display. There's a hierarchy of sea glass -- oranges, reds, yellows, and purples are rare. Black is almost impossible to find. The common blues and greens and browns are a dime a dozen -- a lot of "professional" sea glass collectors wouldn't even bother picking it up, but we like it.



I don't know exactly why I love sea glass so much but I think it has something to do with the idea of something ugly -- something that's basically just trash, junk -- that's transformed and smoothed into something beautiful. I read once that diamonds are made by nature and refined by man; sea glass is made by man and refined by nature. I think that's a really humbling thought.

Do you collect for sea glass? For those of you readers who live in landlocked places, don't forget about beach glass (found along rivers and lakes). For an interesting NYT article about the current state of sea glass collecting in the US, click here.

Have a great weekend!