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While I’ve never once lived in the Northeast, I have traveled to New Jersey many, many times. Having a second family there courtesy of my best friend resulted in my visiting multiple times each year, sometimes for a long weekend, sometimes for a week. Once I stayed for ten full days. Naturally I became very familiar with Central New Jersey (the home of Liz and her family) as well as many places along the Jersey Shore, all the way down to Cape May, the settings for many of our shenanigans. I have always felt very much at home in that state which, by the way, is more beautiful than most outsiders think it is. (Fight me.)

Last month when I went to New Jersey to see Liz for the last time, everything felt different and unfamiliar, because it was. I was staying at a hotel 35 minutes west of her house near Rutgers, an area I have never explored. I wasn’t anywhere near the grocery stores or retail shops or gas stations or diners I was familiar with. There was not a beach to be found nearby.

Oh, and Liz was in the hospital, suffering through the ending stages of ALS, a devastatingly cruel degenerative and terminal disease that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, let alone a friend who was family. (I have never said the word “brutal” as many times in my entire life put together as I did during that weekend, when I was describing what was happening to my husband and the small group of friends who knew where I was and were lovingly supporting me.)

Other than spending as much time with Liz as possible, I had one side mission I was hoping to accomplish: I wanted to go to one of our favorite beaches, the one where the sea glass was so plentiful that Liz and her family (and after my first visit, I too) referred to it as, obviously, “Sea Glass Beach.” We visited several beaches on the Jersey Shore during each of my visits, but this one was almost always on the list, often being the very first place we’d go, and often within an hour or two of my arrival.

I knew in order to get to Sea Glass Beach and back while not cutting into hospital visiting hours by more than about thirty minutes I’d have to get up really early: it would take me nearly an hour to get there. Luckily, I’m a morning person.

I showered the night before so I could basically pop out of bed, brush my teeth, throw on some clothes, and jump in my rental car to head east. When I was on the Garden State Parkway and the darkness of the sky started to give way to beautiful reds, pinks, purples, and oranges, I realized it hadn’t even occurred to me to try to get all the way to the beach before sunrise so I could enjoy that as well. I stepped on the gas and raced the sun towards the shore.

When I got closer to my destination, everything was once again familiar. I teared up as I drove, seeing Liz (or rather, #MeLiz, the nickname she came up with for us) everywhere. There was the bowling alley where we went with our husbands years ago. There was the road that leads to the Mount Mitchill Scenic Overlook, where she took me (with her two older girls) on one of my first visits, right at that time of year when the wisteria was big and beautiful. There was the place where her husband used to work. There was the Naval Weapons Station in Earle, which always started a conversation about Jim’s time in the Navy.

We had the same location-related conversations every time we drove around during my visits, and I loved it. Sometimes when she told me the back story of something, AGAIN, I would make a big deal out of what she was telling me, saying “Oh really? WOW, that’s so interesting! Amazing!” as if it were the first time she was telling me that and not the hundredth, and it would be less than one split second before she would give me the world’s greatest side eye and usually the middle finger, a warning that always sent me into hysterics.

And there was the International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF) corporate headquarters and manufacturing plant, which is located on Rose Lane and pumps the scent of those gorgeous blooms into the air for about a half mile in every direction. Every time we drove by, we could (literally) smell the roses, even with the car windows closed. It was heavenly then, bittersweet now. So many memories, too little time.

Suddenly, I was in the parking lot. I made it to Sea Glass Beach just in time for the final minutes of a beautiful, early-morning color show.

I hadn’t ever visited Sea Glass Beach in the winter, and I hadn’t ever visited alone. But I felt Liz and her daughters, who frequently joined us, right there with me. Our place.

Jim has always described our sea glass hunts as “picking up trash on the Shore,” which always makes me laugh but of course that doesn’t ring true if you’re having fun and doing it right. It’s only trash if the sea glass isn’t “ready” according to a relative scale that Liz taught me by picking up a piece from the sand, inspecting it closely–to see if it was hazy and opaque or still very clear, and if it had beautifully ground down, rounded edges or was still sharp around the sides–and then either nodding and smiling before putting it into her pocket or casually and swiftly tossing it back into the water, confidently stating “Not ready yet.”

She taught me that brown, clear/colorless, and bright green are the most common colors of sea glass (think of how many bottles are made from these glass colors), while sea foam green and amber are a little harder to find. Pink, aqua, blue, and purple are fairly rare, and red, black, turquoise, and orange are very rare. We have found some cobalt blue pieces and on a few occasions we’ve even come home with some tiny red ones. On those days we always felt like we won a major prize.

Something new I learned on that weekend in January: looking for sea glass is very difficult just after sunrise in winter. Not only are parts of the sandy beach frozen and not easy to push around with a shoe or by hand, but also the lack of sun at that hour removes the possibility of finding sea glass because it was shimmering in the light.

In spite of the challenges of my timing, I walked slowly down the beach at the water’s edge with my eyes trained on the sand. It was only a moment before I found my first piece of sea glass, a chunk of brown. I inspected it just like Liz taught me, and then smiled and put it into the bag I brought with me. I found piece after piece, and admittedly I kept a few pieces that were borderline not ready. To be clear, I’d say that they were on the “more ready” side of “not ready.” I’m fairly certain Liz would have thrown them back if I had asked her what she thought, putting me closer to Jim’s “Trash Collector” title in those moments, but this visit was special and therefore I was being a little more lenient than usual. “One man’s trash is a woman’s treasure,” I thought to myself with a little chuckle.

As I walked and collected, I made a mental note to remember the feeling of the heaviness of my little plastic bag, my left hand clutching it so tightly. I connected holding onto these colorful, unique pieces of tumbled glass treasures with holding onto all the colorful and unique memories Liz and I created and stored along the seventeen-year journey of our friendship, revisiting them often during any given moment when we wanted to go back in time.

I wanted so badly to find a piece of red or cobalt blue glass that day. I felt like bringing home one of those would somehow put extra punctuation on the milestone of this particular visit. I was unsuccessful, which wasn’t a surprise: the Universe didn’t want to be poetic that day. I found a beautiful (and whole) mollusk shell and a lot of green, clear/colorless, and brown sea glass (including a couple that still had letters or partial designs on them, which made them seem more special), and I picked up a couple of pretty shell pieces that had been tumbled smooth. I tucked a couple of pieces of tumbled blue tile (“sea pottery,” seriously!) into my bag; we found those at that beach all the time. And then, as if I was being offered a “Ha ha, j/k!” after giving up on finding the rarest colors, I stumbled across a triangle-shaped piece of aqua sea glass that was half the size of a dime. Victory.

When I arrived back at the path that led to the parking lot, I wrapped my hand more tightly around my bag of treasures and turned to face the water for a few minutes to breathe in the beach air and take one last, long look before leaving. I put the bag on the floorboard, started the car, and drove away while keeping an eye on the sandy path down to the beach in my rear view mirror as it got smaller and smaller.

My thoughts then turned to the hospital and the day ahead, another tough one for all of us. As I drove past the IFF plant, I opened my windows all the way down and breathed in the rose fragrance as long and as vigorously as I could, a desperate attempt to somehow seal and preserve the scent along with #MeLiz memories, feeling immense gratitude I have for the years we shared with each other.