On a hot, languorous day, near the end of summer and toward the beginning of third grade, I crept into the darkened hallway of our farmhouse, to lovingly handle the mysterious things in my mother’s grey metal trunk. Every now and again, the chest, bigger than a bale of hay, called to me. I responded to the siren with a secret visit—secret, because I was peering into my mother’s private life, long before we kids came along.
I lingered over the fancy brass latch, which matched the hinges, grasped the handle, and carefully tilted the heavy lid against the wall. I was a goner.
Lifting a blue velvet-covered book, filled with pages and pages of faces, I searched for mother’s young face, surrounded by a fancy collar. She never wore anything like that now. I picked up a small silver dustpan and a brush, decorated with swirly patterns. One time I had asked her what it was for. She said to brush crumbs off a table! That would never happen in our house. The nine of us rarely sat down to eat together. I never touched a packet of letters tucked into a corner. What I liked best was a small round bottle with raised letters on the side. The thick blue glass, darkest I had ever seen, forbade light to penetrate.
After Mom died, my sister Jessie parceled out her meagre belongings. The blue bottle became mine.
When my daughter was little, she would bring tiny “bowers” into the house. I would put the flowers in the bottle and place it on the windowsill above the sink. I had been warned, though I thought my luck was stronger than the wind. In the past, the silent breeze had blown the beautiful bottle into the sink but didn’t break it. I foolishly put it in the window again, filled with flowers carefully lifted from the grass by baby fingers. I was as broken as the glass, when it didn’t survive the second fall.
Many years later, my nephew Eric suddenly died. As a small child, he had collected antiques with my mother, including old bottles. When I lamented to my sister Barbara the fate of our mother’s blue bottle, she surprised me by mailing one from her son’s collection. Light passing through the square, pale turquoise container, gave it an eerie quality, as if it were levitating. Despite the beauty and my sister’s generosity, I did not see how this replacement could ever make up for the loss.
Recently, as I ambled across the lawn, I was dazzled by petite purple flowers poking through blue-green shafts of grass. I gathered what my daughter used to call a “bluekay,” put it in the bottle, and set it on my kitchen window sill.
Transfixed by the light and beauty, I slipped back into the shadowy passageway that embraced my mother’s old trunk. In that fugitive moment, the two vessels merged into one. The bottle is no longer mine, I thought, it holds the joys and losses across time that belong to us all.
© 2022 Fay Loomis
Fay L. Loomis was a nemophilist (haunter of the woods), until her hikes in upstate New York were abruptly ended by a stroke. With an additional nudge from the pandemic, she lives a particularly quiet life. A member of the Stone Ridge Library Writers and the Rat's Ass Review Workshop, her poems and prose have recently appeared in Al-Khemica Poetica, Medusa’s Kitchen, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, As It Ought to Be, Stick Figure Poetry, Mad Swirl, Breath and Shadow, Amethyst Review, Bindweed, True Chili, Blue Pepper, Sledgehammer Lit, Spillwords, and Rats Ass Review.
