I love all beach glass. I find the shapes and the colors endlessly interesting. Each piece tells its own origination and journey story, speaking in tones of curved edges, shadowed letters and lines of pasts as wine or cola bottles, a marble, or a cobalt container of some old patent elixir.   I do play favorites, though. Of course, the really rare orange and lavender thrill me, and a red…well, I’ve been known to happy-dance over a red!   But my “everyday” favorite is the turquoise. I can reasonably expect to find a piece or two of the elusive turquoise (or its more common...

Yesterday I spent almost $100 at the drug store. This was after going through several old first aid kits, throwing away half a big trash can of crusty supplies: bandages that had lost their stickiness, saline eye wash and triple antibiotic wound cream that had expired years ago, and bottles with labels too faded to discern what their contents were, or when they had been created.   I replaced tweezers and scissors no longer present, bought rolls of bandages that had never been present in the first place. I sorted and emptied three large bins of supplies, plus some random pre-made zip...

You have hunted well. You have sorted and piled high your beach glass. Perhaps you have returned to the sea the common browns, along with the tinier whites and greens. But you still have so much! Each piece is special to you and reminds you of your moments by the ocean’s shore looking and finding, deciding what was ready for the taking and what was not. But simply amassed in piles or in generic jars, your treasure looks a little…ordinary. Now what?   Collectors have been grappling with this problem for as long as things have been collected. My father collected cameras:...