Beach Glass

Well, I have been back home for just a few hours over a day now and I kind of miss paradise. The horrible flight, being awake for about 36 hours and the fact that there have been snow flurries drifting down all day makes Hawaii seem even further away than it is. I’m kind of feeling a little sad tonight.

This morning I fell back into my regular Saturday morning routine which involved checking my social media sites, reading the online paper, watching a “how to” program and washing all of that down with tea. It’s thousands of miles, at least seven hours and 25°C away from the way I had started my mornings for the past couple of weeks. In paradise I would wake early, brew a pot of 100% Kona coffee, check my social media (some things never change) while sitting on the lanai with the first cup of the day. Louise would leave to go paddle and shortly after I would go for a long walk on the beach. When I returned from that walk, I would have the second cup of coffee and read a good book until Louise returned when I would make a late breakfast for the both of us while we discussed how to spend the remainder of the day.

When I went on my morning walk I would take pictures and look for treasures that the ocean had washed up overnight. Sometimes there were fish that for some reason passed away during the previous day, poor fishy. Sometimes there would be small shells, rocks and twigs that ended up at the high tide line. I like shells, but these were tiny and mostly broken bits of what would have been nice shells. I have heard the unsubstantiated rumour that the shells sold on the island are gathered somewhere in the Philippines. I don’t know why large shells don’t wash up on Maui, but I can tell you they don’t. What does wash up is beach glass which is what I and many others searched for every morning.

Beach glass is glass from broken bottles that has been broken and sanded smooth by the action of sand and waves. There isn’t a lot of it, but enough to have made my beach walks interesting every day. Most of the glass on the beach is either clear or brown, I suspect from beer bottles that have been tossed in the ocean at some time in the past. I also found some green glass which is a little harder to come by. I have heard of blue glass, but I didn’t find any myself. I talked to a woman who lives on the island and has been looking for glass for many years who told me that the modern glass is generally inferior to the glass that used to wash up. Today’s bottles are manufactured thinner than the old bottles because they are for one time use, rather than in days gone by when bottles were used over and over.

Looking for beach glass is like searching for jewels in the sand. You can walk past an area and on the return trip you will find a piece of glass that you somehow missed the first time. I’ve bent down to look at a coloured shell and found a piece of glass right beside it that my eyes somehow missed. I find the search endlessly fascinating.

I don’t know what I am going to do with the baggie of glass I brought back, but I did see some nice jewellery for sale in some of the shops that was made from beach glass. I might find a small decorative glass jar and fill it with the glass so that I can look at it whenever I have the desire. I suppose that I could make a mosaic from the individual pieces. A sea turtle would be pretty cool if I have the right shapes. If I can pick up a rock tumbler cheaply enough, I might try and make my own sea glass. Then, I could get some blue and in the shapes that I would need for any mosaic.

I can hardly wait!