one man's trash

I spent the last week visiting my elderly parents in the tiny North Atlantic fishing village where they live. By a stroke of fortune, the week we were there the tide happened to be low around 7 or 8 AM, so that I was able every morning to walk the full length of three white sand crescent beaches at the end of their dead end road. Although the seabirds were numerous and raucous, I was often the only person on the beach, free to reminisce, ponder and dream in perfect solitude.

I did a lot of reminiscing. I grew up spending my summers at the beach in New Hampshire where the water is nearly as cold and the sealife the same. I remember so well the pungent almost sufurous smell of the salt marshes - the thrill we felt after hours in the oven of our station wagon and the smell of the burning tar pots that marked the constant road construction north of Boston, when we could finally lean out the windows and smell the beach. I remember days walking the beach with my brother, hunting for treasure, making up stories about pirates and shipwrecks, trying out harmonies and learning to blend our voices over the lapping and breaking of the waves.

I did not come to know this particular Maritime beach with it's numbing cold water until the summer I was twelve, and did not frequent it regularly until I was married. When my children were young we spent weeks every summer here hunting for shells and the hundreds of sand dollars that the tides washed in, building sand castles next to the icy water and watching the waves lap them up as the tide encroached. We walked the beaches for hours, giving a wide berth to marooned jelly fish, watching seabirds dive for fish, chasing sand pipers across the dunes and leaving endless footprints in the wet sand. None of those footprints remain, of course, anywhere but in my memory.

I found myself thinking about mortality and death far more than I wanted to this week. I wanted to think joyful, carefree thoughts on the silvery windswept beach, but I could not escape the fact that the visit I had come to make might be the last time I would see my father alive, that I was already ten years older than my mother was the first time I remember walking this beach. The reminders were everywhere from my father's stooped, unsteady walk to my mother's deeply furrowed cheeks. While I still had a daughter with me who giggled at the way the sand slipped away under her heels when a wave washed out, I had another who was discussing her plans for an upcoming semester in India.

I combed the sand, as one must, for things washed up and abandoned by the tide. What I was most drawn to was the occasional piece of seaglass, clear or green or brown which glowed on the wet sand, unlike the dull, chalky white of the bony sand dollars or shells. I carefully picked up each one I saw and tucked it away in a pocket. I loved the feel of the thick, dull edges under my thumb; edges which at one time would have cut and drawn blood, but were now smooth and safe.

I wondered as I passed over the shells, searching for one more piece of glass, why I was drawn to the man-made, the unnatural items on the beach. Wasn't the natural creation the real wonder and beauty of the beach? What could I find appealing in fragments of broken beer bottles - the detritus left by careless fishermen? Why should I pass over the shells and choose the glass?

The transformation of the broken shards was the real fascination. Pieces which were sharp, dangerous, not to be touched lest they make you bleed had, by the pounding of the surf and the rocking of the waves, the pressure of the deep, the very weight of the water become friendly, safe to the touch, dulled, but also tamed. They still gleamed in the sun, though the patina was definitely softer and they had lost the clarity and sparkle of new glass. But now they could be picked up by even a child, stowed in a pocket, fingered and caressed.

Once discarded as useless, thrown away, cracked and broken, they had become like gems lying on the beach. Not useful anymore, they became beautiful instead, no longer common, they became rare. Not sharp, but soothing; not threatening but somehow comforting. I filled a pocket each day with them and carefully laid them out on a sunny windowsill where they could catch the light and grow warm to the touch.

I love the thought of the change wrought in the remains of old bottles; the inevitability of the softening, the time it must have taken - who knows how many weeks, months or years the pieces endured the action of the ocean before they were gently washed ashore on the beach? Who knows how far they travelled; whether they were tossed from a fishing boat in this very bay or traveled hundreds of miles before landing here. There seems to be no intent on the part of the ocean to file and buff the fierce corners and edges, but given enough time it will always succeed.

Is there a metaphor for life here? My mind, of course, runs that way - to think that time and tide, pressure and pounding, weight and waves can beautify the commonplace, soften the harsh, smooth the rough edges of us all. And they can, but I know that old, broken fragments of humanity are not as predictable as sea glass. We can choose to let time and experience soften and gentle us, or we can fight to stay the same. We can become like seaglass - older, wiser, softer, kinder, less brilliant but more luminous; but the transformation is not inevitable.

As I watch my father and several elderly friends move toward the ends of their earthly journeys I am impressed by the vastly different ways they have weathered the storms of their lives. Some are like old glass, polished and buffed to a lovely glow, their sharp corners mellowed and smoothed by time and trial. Others remain sharp and cutting still, full of hurt and anger, ready to wound any who come too close. They have not allowed the time and tides of their lives to do their softening work.

I suspect we have much more choice about our future shapes than the broken debris tossed into the ocean. We can respond to the waves that toss us in any number of ways. I'd like to end up soft to the touch, comforting, definitely weather-beaten, but not worse for the wear. When the glint and sparkle of my younger days is gone, I'd like to gain the winsome glow of the seaglass , the small treasure that catches your eye as you walk the beach. God grant me that grace.