(I love beach glass, and since I live near a public beach, I’ll usually go for a walk and collect some when I get home from work. It can be hard to tell exactly what beach glass looks like when it’s wet, so I usually collect a handful of my favorite pieces, and sort through them later, at home. The best ones I keep and make into jewelry, and the rest goes in a bowl by my door, and when I go for a walk the next day, I’ll return it to the beach. I forget to take the glass with me one day, so when I go out the next day, I have a bigger pile than usual to take back. As soon as I arrive at the beach, I can tell I won’t find much that day – the lake is perfectly calm and flat, so the waves aren’t bringing up new pieces, and the beach is full of families, so the kids will have already collected most of it. As I’m arriving, I see a group of young kids, maybe five or six, finishing up a sand castle.)

Girl: “It’s done! Maybe if we find some beach glass or pretty rocks or something, we can decorate it?”

(I can’t resist.)

Me: “You said you want to decorate it with beach glass?”

Girl: “Yeah, but the bigger kids already found most of it. I don’t know if we can find enough…”

Me: “Here, I can help!”

(I pulled a big handful of beach glass out of my pocket and handed it to her. From the kids’ reactions, you would think I had just given them a treasure chest full of pirate gold! Totally made my day. I continued my walk, and they came and found me a few minutes later, to show me how they’d decorated their sand castle.)

When I was very young, my great-grandma and great-grandpa lived on the beach. Whenever we visited them, my great-grandpa and I would always go for a walk along the beach. We would look at what the ocean washed up and even looked into a tide-pool once.

One day, while we were walking along, a wave rushed up onto the shore and swept me off my feet. My great-grandpa, who wasn’t very fast and walked with a cane, rushed and managed to catch me before I was swept out into the ocean.

He then smiled and told me I had to be so wonderful and important that the ocean, which had been around for millions of years, wanted to keep me.

It is something I carried with me for all of my life, even after my great-grandpa and great-grandma passed on.

This story is part of the Beach roundup! This is the last story in the roundup, but we have plenty of others you might enjoy!

23 Hilarious Stories About Customers Versus Mother Nature

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(I’m at the beach with my sister, when a random woman runs up to me, waving her hands frantically.)

Woman: *shouting* “Are you wearing red pants because you have your period?”

Me: “Uh, no?”

Woman: *calmer* “Crap. Any chance you have a tampon on you anyway?”

Me: “I do.”

(I hand her one and she quickly darts for the nearest bathroom. As she comes out, she shouts to me again from about 20 yards away.)

Woman: “Thank you, tampon lady!”

(I’m in the water at a beautiful, sunlit beach in Hawaii, surrounded by sea turtles, tropical fish, and other natural beauty. A teenage girl pulls out her phone and is obviously disgusted by what she sees:)

Girl: “I’m only getting a 3G connection! How do people LIVE out here?!”

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(I am sunbathing on the beach when a shadow hovers over me. I open my eyes and see it’s a young girl, probably four or five years old.)

Me: “Are you all right? Are you lost?”

Girl: “You have hairy nipples.”

Me: *taken aback* “Ugh, yeah.”

Girl: “Why?”

Me: “Because I’m a man?”

Girl: “Can I have hairy nipples?”

(Before I could respond, a woman (presumably her mother) appeared, grabbed her by the arm, and dragged her away, screaming so loudly about nipples that the entire beach stopped to take notice.)