When I was growing up my grandmother and I used to find and share sea glass. It’s cool stuff for a bunch of reasons. It’s broken glass, but not sharp (especially cool when you are a kid and told not to touch broken glass – also when you think about how fragile glass can be, but the journey sea glass has held up through). Sea glass is pretty, can be made into things and comes in all sorts of colors. It has an unknown history – possibly rolling along from the other side of the world for the past century. You don’t know who may have held it. Perhaps it was part of a message in a bottle sent by someone looking for a lost love or from people living on Gillian’s Island. Maybe it crashed off of a pirate ship in a drunken brawl, or was dumped off a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean by someone on their honeymoon, or was set down by someone at the same beach and carried away in the tide only to return to the same shore years later.
These days, as you walk along the beach, sea glass is harder to find. I always search and do find it here and there, but with many years in between discovery.
We have a rock tumbler. This morning it occurred to me, that I can make my sea glass. A quick Google search reveals that I can, with only glass and sandbox sand. The tumbled glass might be lacking a mysterious history element and of course, there is no thrill of the hunt, but witnessing the transformation, getting to smash and choose glass for the job and the homage to my grandmother would fill me up enough to try this at least once.
