AUTUMN IS HERE  & THE STORY BEHIND THE BLUE BOTTLES

Autumn is here, but summer isn’t quite over yet. In the week since I wrote about perseverance, I have been busy. I’ve picked beans, tomatoes, and apples and looked longingly at the quinces hanging on the tree. There is still more of everything. At my table, I have been writing, editing, and rewriting chapters for my second memoir. On Sunday, I worked with over 9,000 words and happily have six more chapters ready for my Beta Readers. It was fulfilling yet exhausting. 

The week was also filled with other activities. Working in my garden some mornings, walking my two dogs, Henry and Daisy, and volunteering to cook breakfast for a ninety-year-old and take another to a doctor’s appointment. Today is peaceful, and I am finally back at my table, ready to write the story of Why Blue Bottles? It is a question I have been asked many times before and again recently.

It all started many years ago when I drove a large truck and was a landscaper for about twenty people. I wrote Peripheral Vision, a piece about traveling around town and the strange things I saw daily.

Excerpt:

The most fascinating are the juxtapositions between health and hazard. Round a curve in the street, a woman rides her bike. She’s wearing shorts, a blouse, and a white knitted cap pulled tight over her head. A long blonde curl has escaped, dangling below her ear. She holds the handlebar with her left hand and a cigarette in her right hand. 

I saw a man with brown hairy legs buzzing by on a motorbike. He sported a racy helmet and wore a thin T-shirt, khaki shorts, and running-style shoes. I pondered; his head was protected if he had an accident, but his beautiful, bronzed, brown-haired legs might get torn apart. The sight made me sigh, and the thought made me shudder.

Returning from a job along Toad Lake, my eye was caught by a flash of cobalt blue in a curbside recycling bin. I had to stop and take a look. There were five large bottles. What a party it must have been, I thought. My mind wandered to a possible house full of boozy bodies sleeping on the floor. Each bottle was a liter and a half, and being curious once my imagination was set in motion, I checked the alcohol content, 80% proof! That wasn’t my problem; I didn’t want to drink it. I just wanted those cobalt blue bottles. I  put them carefully in a bucket in the back of my truck, brought them home, washed them, and used Goo Gone to remove the labels and stored the bottles until I found more. 

A short time later, a neighbor was leaving the area and had a party. Someone brought a case of Bud Light. It came in Cobalt blue glass bottles. I asked if I could have the empty bottles. Another of my neighbor’s favorite drinks was Bombay Sapphire Gin; they come in ice blue bottles. My collection was growing. How was I going to use the bottles? My first inspiration was to buy a couple of bottle trees.

Having made a start to my Art in the garden, I did a little research into the history of blue bottles. The original idea was a folklore legend going back to ninth-century Congo. The belief was that blue bottles held healing powers, especially the cobalt ones: if hung upside down in a tree, they would ward off or trap evil spirits. The custom was passed on through the generations coming to America through the slave trade in the 17th century. I love the sunlight reflecting off the bottles placed around the garden.  

While designing my garden and finding ways to create different levels for flowering plants, I had rebar arches made. I have six in my garden that span walkways and are covered in the summer with clematis vines. Another autumn job, as most of them are cut down close to the ground before the winter. I needed to create fences and gates to keep the deer from wandering through. 

I took my designs to a local company, and they bent the rebar into my creations. I collected a lot of blue bottles and had spikes set into the gate design to hold the bottles. All this happened long before I started a writing group in 2018 as an activity for members of Bellingham at Home. Two years later, we had enough stories to publish a collection of our work. Now, we needed a name for our first book. We came up with many ideas, and finally, a picture of my gates gave us the perfect answer. The Blue Bottles Writing Studio A Variety of Stories From Four Independent Authors, still available from Amazon.