By Sara Anne Donnelly
Photos by Dave Waddell
From our April 2025 Home & Garden issue
During a trip to Bar Harbor in the mid ’90s, Cheryl Staples spotted a chunk of sea glass shining like a sapphire on the beach. She dug it out, dusted it off, and held it up to the sun. The smoothed jar bottom seemed to glow in her hand. “I really enjoyed how beautiful it was,” Staples recalls. “So I put it in my pocket and that was that.” Every day for the remainder of the vacation, she trolled the beach, filling gallon-size Ziploc bags with sea glass. After returning home to Skowhegan, she began heading to Hancock and Winter Harbor after storms to dig bare-fingered through snarled seaweed and under washed-up tree limbs along the high-water mark for the bounty an angry sea can deliver. She plucked other prizes from the muddy foreshore, racing to claim them before they were poached by icy swells. During these excursions, Staples would often talk to the churning water, asking it for specific pieces. “But I never get mad at the ocean,” she says. “Sometimes I’m disappointed, but I’m always thankful.”
The ocean has given Staples plenty to be thankful for. Decades of hunting trips have yielded a shard of pottery stamped with her maiden name, George, a quarter-size porcelain doll head (“kinda creepy, but kinda cool too”), a chandelier’s crystal finial, a maritime oil lamp’s copper top, a skeleton key, a mid-century Buick emblem, and fragments of what appear to be the same lime-green mug, unearthed on separate visits to Roque Bluffs State Park, spaced about two years apart. She’s also amassed some 5,000 pieces of sea glass, which she separates by color and type and displays in her home in glass jars and the compartments of an antique wooden printer’s drawer. Her trove includes marbles so weathered they resemble sugar-coated jawbreakers, antique bottlenecks with their stoppers, rare orange glass (largely discontinued by bottle manufacturers after 1960), and 18th- and 19th-century “pirate glass” that turns from pitch black to purple, green, or amber when held up to the light.
At a worktable beneath a Jolly Roger flag declaring “Pirate Life Forever,” Staples creates sea-glass jewelry, mobiles, and other artwork for friends and to sell at a River Roads Artisans Gallery (75 Water St., Skowhegan. 207-612-1017). At age 68, she’s no longer comfortable navigating storm surges and rocky shorelines alone. She still makes a handful of beach trips per year, though, and not to lounge. “I can’t sit on a beach and not get up and look,” she says. “It’s like, I know there’s stuff out there to find and I’m going to find it.”
Read more stories about Maine collectors and their treasures, off-grid Maine homes, and more in our Home & Garden issue.
