Today was the first day I've been seaglass hunting in over a week. It's an almost daily obsession, and as of late has primarily been in Salem, MA. I was away because I had an adventure on a sailboat going to Provincetown for the 4th of July weekend. Mechanical problems kept us there an extra day (not a horrible place to be stranded though). The trip ended with an unplanned midnight swim for me off a slippery dock which truly cashed in another one of my 9 lives. So as I poked around Derby Wharf today, bruises and muscle strains too sore to bend down much except for extra-extra-good treasures, I recognized that I was grateful to be alive on a beautiful summer day, still doing one of the things I love best.
Now I've found some cool things in my shore walks - from tiny frozen charlotte dolls, to marbles, to beautiful pieces of pottery and old glass bottle inkwells. I've found old lead soldiers, a ring, and a couple of faucet nozzles which looked new enough to take home and try out (only to find out they were inoperable). But today has to take the prize as the most humorous and unusual for me. I bent down to pick up what looked like a pretty piece of orange and red pottery with what I thought were barnacles on it. Instead, it turned out to be a very old partial denture. I have to figure out how to date it - the 3 teeth on it are very small so I'm guessing it was a woman's plate. It seems like a very brittle plastic - maybe a precursor to lucite or something - and the teeth were affixed by sort of jamming them on it. I wonder what the story was behind this denture ... Did she meet her demise at sea? Did she accidently flush the denture down a toilet and it ended up in Salem Harbor? Did she lose it in the ocean laughing as her lover tickled her in the waves? That's what I enjoy most about my finds; pondering the stories behind them, identifying the pottery marks or the age of the glass bottle; thinking about the child who was playing with the tiny porcelain doll. We are all connected through history and time by the things that remain.
