Free Strawberries in the Sea by Elisabeth Ogilvie

up with the gas.
    She thought she might be able to borrow tools from him, but she wouldn’t ask unless she knew beyond a doubt that she couldn’t make do; she hadn’t been through the fishhouse yet.
    Just as she was leaving, two women came round the corner. There were startled but friendly greetings, she flung back her responses at random and kept on going. She was perspiringly aware of her rear view in the tight jeans, but there was nothing to do but keep going and for God’s sake remember to put a dress on if she came down to the store again for anything, which she would have to do if she didn’t intend to live on shore greens and mussels.
    In the noon quiet, when Sunday dinner occurred on Bennett’s Island just as it did everywhere else, she took the wheelbarrow and went down to the fishhouse for the rest of her belongings. The building was so crowded with the debris of years that she wondered how the Wylies had ever had room to work in here. Even the workbench was loaded. She cleared a path through a tangle of old rope, rotten laths, empty paint cans, used shingles saved for kindling in the almost-buried oil-drum stove, cardboard cartons, buoys, broken furniture, and finally reached the ladder to the loft.
    After the mess downstairs, the space under the roof seemed extravagant. It hadn’t been too handy to throw junk up a ladder.
    It was lighted by two gable windows, one giving on the harbor and the other on the island. The light was dimmed through dusty and cobwebbed glass, but she could make out the big pile of soft black nets in one corner, a long-handled dipnet, a flounder trap, and in another corner an old wooden fish box full of glass balls.
    She felt something like an upsurge of joy, a faint one to be sure, a mere ghost of the old stab of rapture at finding some unexpected treasure, but the sensation set up a chain reaction so that when she knelt beside the box she was simultaneously discovering mayflowers for the first time in her life; she was carrying into the kitchen a stray kitten found crying on the doorstep; she was finding a small punt on the beach after a hurricane, entwined in kelp, half full of sand and rock-weed, but perfectly whole; and seeing her first guitar under the Christmas tree.
    No one else had ever found her mayflower patch, she’d been allowed to keep the kitten, the advertisements about the punt had never been answered so it became hers, and the guitar had become her second voice. There had been other discoveries and other gifts, but these had gone deepest in a way to become bone of her bone, so that now, as she knelt by the box, sights, sounds, smells, and textures overlaid each other; mayflower fragrance and cold wet leaves, kitten fur under her chin and the small heart beating under her fingers, the drenched pungence of the storm-torn shore and the long cannonade of surf; the lustrous curves of polished wood reflecting Christmas lights, the smell of fir, and with it the pain in her fingertips from the tight wire strings, so that they almost stung now as they touched the cool dusty surface of the glass ball floats.
    The last ones she’d seen had been old Chet Parkin’s toggles, and they had belonged first to his uncle. He’d had to take them all up finally and use bottles, because some boys began stealing them, cutting them off the warps in their twine bags, and selling them to an antique dealer out of town.
    Here there must be twenty-five or more. They were amber, faint amethyst, and the palest blues and greens; even the clear ones had a tint. She held them up to the light and saw her fingers change color. They were treasure found in a cave, or magic fruit in a forest. She could have made a song about them, but it would have to be sung to herself alone, you couldn’t say the word balls out loud without someone cackling.
    Where had they come from? Did Jude know about them? If so, why had he left them behind? If she bought the place, would they