Through a glass, bottlely.

Walking the dog in the woods a few days back and came across this curious object:

Not that it's odd to find a bottle in the woods. Oh, heck no. This isn't exactly the Appalachian Trail we were on. It was a patch of woods that runs behind a school, I think, and some homes, and I don't think it belongs to anyone but the town, but I'm not sure. 😬 Anyway, however suburban your New York town may be, there's always a pretty good chance of finding beer bottles and cigarette butts.

But this was odd -- a glass bottle that has been hanging around so long that it appears the elements removed all trace of the label. No cap evident. If there were a number of beer cans around it might have seemed less odd, really, but this was all by itself.

I suppose it's a pint bottle, the sort favored by sneaky drinkers. Many of those are plastic, though. This is thick, clear glass of good quality. The first thing I thought of when I saw it was not furtive boozing; it was that, in my youth, people liked to collect old bottles, clean them up, and put them here and there as decorative elements. They were often colored glass, not very big, sometimes from the 1800s. There's still a market, but people don't seem to do that much anymore.

I've always liked bottles, but never collected them. Too fragile. My reputation as a clumsy oaf influenced my decision, perhaps.

I have done my bit to empty bottles, however; more than I can ever estimate. Some I left in the woods, too. Some made things blurrier the more clear they got. Some made it harder for me to see entirely. Bottles can be like that.

I left the bottle where we found it. It had earned the right to be free, full of only autumn air.