On the Nature of Miracles

A work of creative nonfiction
by Dianne McKnight

After college I set up housekeeping with things I scavenged from trash left out on Monday nights for pick-up the next day. In my mind I’d picture what I needed, and more times than not when my dog and I made our neighborhood rounds after dark in Beverly, Massachusetts, I’d find something at least in the right category, like dishes or chairs. And sometimes I’d find exactly what I wanted, like Christmas tins for cookies I’d made that very day for presents. My dog loved the walks too. She’d nose around the outside of a garbage can, taking inventory, while I examined a lamp or book—whatever had been left in the pile out on the curb.

We’d walk the beach every day too, even in snow and rain, looking for treasures. And for us the beach was a great place to find them. A long time ago garbage had been dumped just beyond the harbor, not far out past Mackerel Cove, and a little of it came in with every tide.

My dog, Emily, preferred the more recent stuff and usually ate what she found, but I brought what I found home for display. At first it was only beach glass. Every day I dropped the pieces I found into a jar of water sitting on the table by the window in the kitchen. Colorless pieces glistened like ice cubes in the afternoon light there, and pieces of green and brown looked like fat jewels, their edges rounded smooth by water and sand and time.

But that was only the beginning.

I started finding aqua-colored glass from old Coke bottles and pieces of deep cobalt blue. I found pale lavender glass like the kind in Beacon Hill windows, and sometimes an etched piece of Victorian red. One morning a large blue marble, still wet, balanced perfectly on a rock. The sunlight sparkled on it like cellophane.

Then I began seeing the shards, pieces of plates and bowls and cups. I found white pieces at first, then a few other colors, then mostly blue and white ones, my favorite. I started counting and soon nine out of every ten pieces I found were blue and white. One day in March, after a big snowstorm, I found a blue and white piece as big as my hand. It looked Chinese and ancient, maybe from the days of China trade in Salem, but the blue was still deep and strong.

One day while we walked on the beach, I turned the puzzle over and over in my mind. Was blue and white the most popular color, by far, for dishes back then? Had other colors simply faded faster than blue? But if that were true, shouldn’t I have been seeing lots of white shards? I hadn’t. Did I see more blue and white pieces just because I liked them best?

I sat on the sand next to where Emily snooped around some faded McDonald’s wrappers. She shook the paper and chewed and I smiled at how she always managed to find the last soggy french fry on the whole beach. “How do you do that?” I asked.

She looked at me as if to say, “Just nose.”

High over the mussel beds, seagulls dropped mussels then swooped down and ate them. With so many identical shells below, how could the birds know which ones were cracked from the falls? I looked at the shards in my hand and thought about the seagulls. I thought how I could spot a piece of Blue Willow at five feet, even in the middle of a conversation with a friend.

“Just eyes,” I said.

Not far away people ate burgers and the tide came in.