After a week indoors—babysitting and feeling sick—I ventured out yesterday. I felt close to being better and it was sunny, though cool once I stepped out, and my mother wanted the dog walked anyways. The dog who, when kept inside all day, gets antsy during the night and rips apart tissue boxes or decapitates/unstuffs her toys. The dog and I walked and met up with my friend, Rose, and we decided to go to Wreck Cove, a beach tucked away on the same road as the popular South Beach.

Wreck Cove has always been my favorite beach to comb through. The fine sand is minimal; most of the beach is made up of smooth stones that shrink as you get closer to the water. After walking around, I picked a spot and sat, stroking through the pebble-sand and finding pieces of sea glass—blue, red, turquoise, yellow—most the size of grains of rice.

In my mind, the downfall of Wreck Cove has always been the path to get there. A few years ago a group of teenagers fleshed out a new path as a sort of service project, so it has very much improved since then. Walking down there yesterday, however, still proved challenging—the snow still very much present in the woods. Rose took an odd step onto the snow that shattered into a hidden puddle. The old path is mostly overgrown by now; even the deer have opted for the new one.

I remember going to Wreck Cove when I was younger—mostly with my aunt Shirley. She took us a few times, as scavenging teammates, when Cross Jewelers in Portland had a contest in which it released gift certificates as messages in bottles into Casco Bay. We never found one in any of our trips to Wreck Cove, the other beaches, or even in our quests across sandbars to Overset and Marsh Island. Wreck Cove is still the only beach I can remember finding a message in a bottle on—I think it was a letter to a grandfather who had passed away.

We finally left the beach when my hands were too cold to hold the mussel shell I was keeping my sea glass in, reminding me that it’s not quite spring yet (even if the calendar now says so), but that it’s coming.

Melanie Floyd is a recent University of Maine at Farmington graduate who has returned to her native Long Island in Casco Bay.