Bits and Pieces

Much of this weekend’s leisure time was spent perusing my old collection of colonial era artifacts , the boxes containing which I procured when visiting the parental units yesterday morning. I haven’t looked through these boxes in eight or nine years and it was nice sorting through again the material remnants of a long ago era, those broken pieces of porcelains, earthenware pottery, wine bottles, pipe stems, and so on that I so eagerly collected as a youth. When other kids were out playing baseball or some other typical pursuit, I was canvassing the plowed fields behind our home, walking up and down the rows in search of any little fragment of material evidence of what used to be on our land beyond the depths of memory or family lore.

To be sure, such pieces of broken this or that hold no monetary value (or little value in general for that matter) as they are at their heart nothing more than old trash. Yet they are also a link to a bygone era; each piece has its own story (European manufacture, trans-Atlantic shipping, etc) and collectively they tell a story of a past way of life and the forgotten people who inhabited that particular piece of land long before the American Revolution. In this sense, they are much more than just refuse, they are a collective door to the past, waiting for the right person with the right key to unlock their secrets.