For Gloucester girl, a memory washes ashore
Bottled up for 5 years, goodbye note to grandma returns
When little Sabine Harnisch put a hand-scribbled message to her late grandmother in a small glass bottle and tossed it into Gloucester Harbor, she never thought she’d see it again.
In the five years that have passed since she said goodbye to her beloved grandma, Sabine, now 13, said she forgot all about the message in the bottle.
But the memory came rushing back yesterday when she received an unexpected call from Jana Simonds, of Nahant, who spotted the bottle in the street while walking to meet her neighbor, Larry Carlson, for lunch, just before yesterday’s historic midday high tide lashed the coastline. Inside, she found Sabine’s message, along with her phone number.
“Dear Grandma, I know that you are not reading this note because you are perished,” the note read. “Soon we will be with you. Your one and only.”
Simonds said when she met Carlson at nearby Tides Restaurant & Pub, the pair decided to place a call to the number on the back.
“We shared it with the waitress and Larry said ‘I have to call them,’” Simonds said. “It’s fascinating. When I could read the paper with the numbers still clear, I had to call.”
Sabine’s mom, Taylor Harnisch, said she was waiting in her car outside the dollar store in Gloucester, where her daughter was picking up poster board for a school project, when her phone rang. On the other end was Carlson, who told her about the message.
“I didn’t know she had done that,” Harnisch said. “It was a big surprise. It’s wonderful it lasted that long and showed up again.”
Sabine said hearing that her bottle had washed ashore brought back a sad memory of the day a little girl said goodbye to her grandma, Susan.
“I was on the beach when I was writing it. As soon as I finished, I threw it in the ocean,” she said. “I didn’t remember writing this until they called us. I was really surprised.”
Harnisch said their journey to Nahant yesterday to retrieve the message was the first time they’d ever been to the town.
Her mother, she said, used to talk about her friend on Nahant and the happy memories she had of time she spent there. The fact that the bottle washed up there was serendipitous.
“One of her closest friends was from Nahant. She would love it and this story,” Harnisch said with a smile. “My mother was wonderfully kind. She lived with us until Sabine was
5 or 6. She was like a second parent. It was a strong connection.”
After thanking Simonds and Carlson for calling her up, Sabine said she was going to take the little glass bottle home.
The message from a little girl to her grandma that spent five years at sea will now be something she’ll cherish forever.