The Green Love Anthology

“Eureka!” Amy cried out as she plucked the rare chunk of cobalt-blue beach glass from the sand.

Larger than a quarter, it sparkled in the sun like a jewel. She turned it over and over again, admiring its brilliant blue hue and the soft sheen that came from years of tumbling in nature’s lapidary.

When she was a little girl, Amy’s parents often took her to hunt for beach glass along the Maine coast. Usually she’d bring home a pail full of treasures––amethyst, pink, and turquoise glass as well as the cobalt pieces that remained from vintage medicine bottles.

Now, however, everything was packaged in plastic. The beach was strewn with it. Amy spotted plastic soda bottles, detergent jugs, and containers that had once held mustard, motor oil, or mosquito repellant wherever she looked. Sometimes medical waste and even drums full of toxic sludge that had been dumped at sea washed up on shore.

Amy put the blue beauty in a jar with the few green and amber pieces she’d collected this afternoon and sat down on a rock to watch the tide roll out. The wind off the north Atlantic twisted her caramel-colored hair around its airy fingers. The tourists were gone and on this cool, late September Wednesday she had the beach almost to herself. A man threw a stick into the water for a golden retriever to fetch. Two women who looked like they’d stepped out of an L.L.Bean catalog passed her without even a nod. Mainers have never been known for their congeniality, she reminded herself.

Further down the beach she spotted a man dragging a black plastic garbage bag behind him. Every so often he stopped, picked up something, and tossed it into the bag. As he drew closer, she could see he was collecting trash. Not all of it, though. He carefully selected certain items as if he were shopping for produce at the supermarket. An orange gallon jug went into the garbage bag, followed by a lime-green spray bottle. He snagged a blue container and a purple one, but ignored several clear plastic water bottles and a broken Styrofoam cooler.

When he was about twenty feet away, he noticed her watching him and waved. Amy waved back. He plunked a few more brightly colored objects into the bag, tied it, and walked over to her.

“Why do you only pick up the colorful trash?” she asked.

He brushed his curly, dark hair out of his eyes and smiled at her. “I’m going to recycle it into art.”

He has a nice smile, she thought. Easy, relaxed, his perfect teeth white as pearls against his deep tan.

“How can you make art out of old plastic bottles?”

“You can make art out of anything. All you need is imagination.” He smiled again. “Want to see?”

“Sure.” She tucked the jar of beach glass into her canvas tote while he retrieved his bag of trash.

“My studio’s not far from here,” he said.

“I’ll follow you.”

He pitched the garbage bag into the bed of an old pickup. Amy trailed him in her Honda for about a mile to a gray-shingled building at the edge of town. A six-foot-long wooden shark, painted peach with fuchsia fins, hung over the door. It held a sign in its teeth that said “Liam O’Toole, Art & Odd Stuff.”