Rhyming Relics

I was just looking at a pair of glass artifacts, two Rosslyn relics among so many we’ve discovered and inherited since the summer of 2006 when this old house became our new home. Remember the ferry posters in my “Relics Rhymed” post? These are similar. And different. While the differences are apparent, perhaps the similarity is not. Glass souvenirs of bygone days. Colorful. Timeworn. Ephemera transformed into beautiful time capsules. Rhyming relics…

This antique aqua colored Mason’s Improved glass canning lid (jar closure) has an embossed patent date of May 23, 1871. A utilitarian device. Or, more precisely, a PART of a utilitarian device. Useful once upon a time. Discarded were no longer useful. Or possibly by mistake.

Another utilitarian device. Apparently most of the antique, cobalt blue glass Bromo-Seltzer bottles were made by hand between the late 1800s and the early 1900s by Cumberland Glass Manufacturing Company and Maryland Glass Company among other manufacturers. (Source: glassbottlemarks.com)

Ephemera. Useful for a moment. Long ago.

Both were disinterred during the excavation of Rosslyn’s icehouse. Relics discarded, and then re-discovered. Ephemera, utility long since exhausted, reemerging. Reimagined.

That aquamarine glass is nothing if not beautiful. A crystallized sphere of the sky. Of Lake Champlain.

And that cobalt blue — another mood of Rosslyn’s sky and lake — is all the more intriguing for the iridescent scaling and time’s “tough love” etched into the bruised and mottled glass.

[relics] rhymed
by the tides of time,
memory’s meager
mitigating reach.
(Source: Relics Rhymed)

Rhyming relics, shades of blue, softened by a century or more, offering us a gentle invitation to imagine the past. To reimagine the present and future.

A piece of a poem, a poetry puzzle piece, a poet-sherd,… Those last two lines are a piece of what I’ve been wrestling with in so many ways. How does the past extend into the present? To and through the bits and pieces proffered by history, inherited evidence of a long before, timeless tidbits ostensibly proving our place in the river of life and death, creation and destruction? Do these artifacts salve us? Many questions. Few answers… (Source: Relics Rhymed)

I’m struck with how these rhyming relics resonate now. Today. Polished by time’s “tough love”. Iridescent.

And with this timely graffito gathered from a broken fortune cookie that I offered to Carley.

Rhyming relics are inevitably altered, even if subtly, when I adapt them, reuse them, repurpose them. And I’m okay with that. I’m comfortable with imagination as my copilot if and when memory asks for assistance.