I am newly interested in glass bottles as a hobby. I wash the glass bottles that show obvious signs of re-use, dip them in warm water to remove the sticker, and finally scrub them with baking soda to remove all traces of who they used to be. Then, I dry them in the sun like the women before me did. I store them in my mother’s mounted cupboard, where you can find a garden variety of washed, cleaned, and odour-free glass bottles. Then, I use these glass bottles to store forest green pumpkin seeds, crimson mango pickle, white slender sunflower seeds, and coconut jaggery, the colour of earth. The other day, I made overnight strawberry oats in a glass bottle that used to hold fruit jam inside it, and now, it is one of the many little windows into peeking beauty and stories of hard work – both by nature and by humans. What started out as a matter of reusability now has the makings of a side quest.
Last week, while walking back from my gym, I saw a tall, green glass bottle of beer lying empty under a tree. The person who had the beer did not deign to throw it in the dry trash can nearby. Such glass bottles are usually re-used to plant money-plants in them or to be used for a DIY project with fairy lights. I have one of them. It is a frosted bottle stuffed with fairy lights; on the front, someone has painted a reindeer in a dextrous hand, and underneath it, my pen name, amarllyis, is written in calligraphic font. I had received it as a Christmas gift many years ago, and it sits pretty inside my cupboard to this day. Another Christmas gift I received last year was a sipper that I put on my Secret Santa wishlist because I wanted to cut down my use of paper cups. My friend gifted me a frosted sipper, which I use every time I get a take-away drink.
As it turns out, glass bottles are relatively easy to recycle but take thousands of years to decompose. Not only will these bottles outlive me, but they will probably last a millennium at the minimum, and plastic will decompose before they do. So it seems like the plastic I was trying to eliminate from my life was the better option for the planet, after all. It always happens this way, doesn’t it? You think one thing is better than another, that you are making an informed decision, and a curveball comes out of nowhere. I am not regretting my glass-bottle-side-quest; I am merely making a simplistic deduction that may not be warranted.
Now that I have recognised that I have an unusual hobby on the prowl, the glass bottles seem to be burgeoning out of the woodwork. There’s one with black amla candy in it and one with ground flax seeds, which I am not certain do anything, really. Or do they? It seems reminiscent of what I had read when I was younger about how if you notice something new, you will see it everywhere. I suppose I have caught a fancy for filling transparent containers with this and that, and that’s pretty much all there is to it. Why should it be anything more?
amarllyis 