"Zipper" Harris. Part One. "Stumble Blocked".

"Zipper" Harris

Part One

"Stumble Blocked"

            “AVE been TALK’EN bout AUCTION for THREE generations that I can remember.  POTTERS place and they NEVER SHUT-UP.  That Ellen Potter didn’t MARRY until LATE.  KEPT her SILVER SPOONS where the sun don’t shine I told her.  LOT OF HER where the SUN don’t  shine.  If you know what I mean.

            “I’VE been in there off an on now forty YEARS.  I figure.  Them spoons is still in there somewhere too nears as I KNOW.  Lot of things in that dark in there.  I figure I just keep showing up.  MRS. Potter but now I’m ELLEN.  Been that many years. Ellen won’t you SELL ME TODAY.  I been in-shed.  I been in the barn.

            But I ain’t been in the bed.

            YET.”

            “Zipper” Harris is a local longtime antiques picker (finder of antiques).  I’ve known him all my life.  I started being an antiques dealer before he become a picker.  Before that he was just “Zipper”.  “Zip” for short.  That he come by quite early; first grade we all remember.  In first grade when we’d go outside on recess Zip could never zip his jacket up.  The teacher... Mrs. Dunlady... always had to do it.  You know:  With him inside the jacket.  Never could zip it himself.  Next year; second grade, still couldn’t do it.  Went along so in FIFTH GRADE he’s STILL having the teacher zip him up.  So right along we started calling him ZIPPER.  Or Zip.  And that’s stuck.

            Then he become an antiques man.  Picker.  Zipper the picker.

            He parents run a motel out on Two.  Always run it.  You Know:  Nice place nothing fancy TOURIST place.  Zip always worked there.  Now he’s most of the place himself.

            His folks live in the HOUSE and that walks through the old barn out back to where Zip’s built himself a bungalow:  Nice little cabin that’s a HOUSE.  Out back there.  He goes in through the old barn to the parent’s house.  That barn he uses for his antiques.  I’m always in there.  Never been in Zip’s bungalow.  I always go to the front door of the parents house and they let me in to walk through into the barn.  Except in summer when I pull around back of the house to the side door of the barn.  Zip opens that door in the summer and has his antiques sign out by the road.  He sells to the ones who stop.  They go in the side door with their wallet and come back out with no more money and a pile of junk Zip just sold ‘em.  ‘WORKS OUT FINE DON’T IT’ Zip always says to ‘em.

            Everyone is looking to buy the old fly fishing equipments so Zipper figures he’s gonna be special on that.  ‘Cept that... well... it isn’t that easy to get anymore.  BUY IT mostly and Zip don’t like having to do that so most of it he misses out.  Oh he got plenty of the old crud; the old Sears and rob junk.  Nothing FINE any more.  Zip:  He get beat out on that at the sales and auctions.  So he’s just got the old crud he puts outside the barn in the summer trade.  I don’t say anything about this to ‘im.  I know it’s a sore spot.

Most of what he gets I don’t want and he tries powerfully hard to make me want it he says.  Most of the time we fall back to just chat and looking over a prospect if some summer people stop going through. Zip works them hard if he thinks they’ll show color (old gold digger’s panning expression).

            I seen him sell “The POPE’S Hat” to a couple from LONG ISLAND.  Some fraternal thing he called the POPE’S HAT.  They didn’t know nothing.  I think.  Maybe they did.  Anyway:  They bought it.  That’s the kind of stuff he sells there mostly.

            Zip can go a pretty long time without having to find (“buy”) anything.  He got plenty around he’s dragged home.  Always something around like a canoe chair he wants too much for.  And stuff like that.  Some of it been there TWENTY YEARS I swear.  He don’t move on his price.  Funny thing is he actually remembers all their prices.  He’s got one of them Langley’s Root and Herb Bitters bottles; just the aqua common one.  NO PONTIL.  He want twenty-five.  It’s only worth TEN.  But he’s had that in there twenty-five years.  For twenty-five dollars.  Every summer they ask it (the price) over and over.  “STILL GOT IT” some of ‘em say.  The reason he does that is he likes it; that Langley’s.  HEAVEN FORBID he finds a GOOD (old) BOTTLE.

            One time he had a Warner’s (Safe Cure) box with three bottle still in it FULL. Kept ‘em out in the barn they never froze I wonder why.  RIGHT?  Anyway.  He sold ‘em.  The BOX with the bottles still in it.  Summer guy went back and forth for an HOUR and then give Zip the hundred fifty.  After he left Zip celebrated.  Went through the house out to the soda machine and took off a Moxie.  Locked it (the soda machine for the motel) back up and walked around the side of the house to the barn’s antiques door. He sat down and opened it. He SAT in that chair; that old PRIVATE SCHOOL arm chair, sipping it for TWO HOURS.  JESUS you think he’d OFFER me one.  I said so.  He just laughed. I’ve never sat in that chair of his either. 

            You ever been in a house with him?  Jesus.  He stands his ground with a DOLLAR.  And that WORKS TOO.  Tight.  Jesus.  You get all the way in there way to a back shed or something and he gets a dollar out on some old buckets or such.  Then he says the dollar for all the buckets.  Then the old fella says okay real slow the way they do. Then Zip; he’ll say “WELL I don’t know IF I SHOULD for THAT dollar.  Just like that he say that.  Then that old fella... why he’s STUMBLE BLOCKED.  So then Zip says “I’ll tell you what put in them two (old wooden) BOXES and I’ll CALL IT a TRADE.  Course the old fella DOES.

            That’s how he gets all the crud he’s got.  It’s a slow and steady process.  I asked him about a pair of chairs he’s got in there (the antiques shop barn).  I asked in nineteen seventy-seven I swear.  He says he can’t sell ‘em.  “FOLKS” he says “HAVE TWO MORE MATCHING”.  Won’t sell ‘em he says.  Don’t even know what they are ‘cept that they’s IN THE HOUSE.  His he got in the barn.  He says he’s just waiting.  Been forty years.  Damn fool.

            He found a Civil War belt buckle in there.  (Ellen Porter’s house?  Never been clear to me).  He put it out in the barn.  SIX YEARS they (Civil War collectors) all come by and told him it was a “fake”.  Six years of that.  One day one of ‘em brings a summer sport along and they talked that buckle over for an hour.  Then Zip tells him fifty bucks and that it’s a fake.  That fella look back and forth then paid out the fifty.  Zip folded the money into his pocket.  “That buckle ain’t FAKE.” the fella said.  Jesus if you think Zip forgot THAT.  Only ‘better one’ I ever seen get him.

            Zippy’s a funny man get’en to be a funny old man now.  Seems to be.  He don’t know any art.  He knows an old thing; that something is old.  But he don’t know its ART.  I told him once.  Now probably thirty years ago.  I come on to an early tall clock up in the attic of the Schooner Winthrop House.  The case was lying down under the eves.  The bonnet was off and pushed in-under too.  The movement was in a box.  Must have been put up there after the Civil War.  All the Winthrop boys were killed in that war.  Union boys.  Whole family went to Hell after that.  No one had been in that attic for a whole century.  So Zip’s up there with me.  He sees the old clock and starts his engine.  “Shut-up” I tell him.

            So the cleanout goes along a couple of days and I take that clock out early the third morning.  I take it right out to the truck and take it right home.  It said “Dover” on the dial.  That’s Dover New Hampshire not Dover England.  Zip is going along with me on all of this.  So he starts his mouth engine up once we’re on the road to my place.

            “Campbell’s” he tells me “got a clock just like this right inside their (antiques) store door.  Come face to face with it every time I go in.  Want seven hundred dollars for it.”  That was it right there for Zip.  My tall clock was just the same as Campbell’s and worth seven hundred dollars.

            I poked that a little as we drove. Did he see the movement?  You mean the works in the box?  Yes.  No he figured they were all there fine.  Did he see me take off and save the finials on the bonnet.  He seen me take off the ‘decorations’.  Did he see me make him take the top end of the case so I wouldn’t have to worry about him chipping the feet on the base.  No he didn’t notice that except that I took “the heavy end”.

            I told him it’s a tall clock, not a grandfather’s clock and the ‘works’ is called a ‘movement’ and is regarded as sculpture; three dimensional art.  He wanted to know if ‘it will work’ (go tick-tock):  “CAMPBELL’S DOES.  HAD A CLOCK MAN FIX IT”.  I give up.  I said the case and bonnet are sculpture too.  “BIG LONG BOX AIN’T IT” he says.  I give  up.  Thirty years ago right then.  Never ever made another try at Zip about art.  Just no point.  I hid that clock in my barn for a decade.  Money in the bank you know.  Zip forgot about it after he told me along that Campbell “SOLD HIS GRANDFATHER”.

            Campbell’s old tall clock was import: Welsh.  Used to import boat loads of ‘em.  They are all the same; cheap junk that people think-look-rich... so that they appear think-look-rich but didn’t have to spend much ($300-$400).  These days those folk have found out the truth and now they won’t even buy ‘em.  I’ve never owned one.

            Ellen Potter has a tall clock too and you bet Zip been ogling that for thirty years.  It a “Hoadley”; a cheap Connecticut wooden movement that peddlers sold from their wagons.  The family would go in town and have the case locally made.  Many times a coffin maker would make a case.  Usually they are plain with a dark brown stain finish.  Some cases are paint decorated fancy and I pay attention to those.  I did glimpse the Potter tall clock when I went to that Ephraim Howe Honor home tour... twenty years ago.  A glimpse is all I needed.  They had to screw those clocks to the wall to make ‘em level so they would work (go tick-tock).  That’s a warning sign right there as to their quality.  Zip, of course, thinks it’s worth seven hundred dollars.  You can see how it is easier just to give up and shut up when it comes to explaining art to Zip.  “ANTIQUES” as he calls them is another  matter.

A New England Pictorial Flask

When I …purchased "a historical flask" (described in the Old Antiques Store post) using the money from my fruit jar sale and the twenty dollar gift from my grandmother, in the fall of my seventh grade year, I realized the end of a two year trail and held that end in my hand. The trail began in fifth grade when I went, one Saturday morning, to the public library and encountered a newly placed glass display case set up in the lobby housing several antiques on display including a half pint cornucopia and urn American (New England) pictorial flask. I was entranced by the display and the case but was smitten with the flask. There was a vague label ("Historical Flask Bottle") with a local man's name as the lender. That's not what smittened me. It was the …thing. It wasn't, to my eye, a "bottle". It was lying flat on its side; turtle shaped, turtle size and turtle colored but made of glass and had a raised decoration on the visible side of a cornucopia. I stared at it and then viewed it from adjusted angles about the case. I did this for weeks. And weeks. I understood the object was "glass" and "old". I was entranced by it. Defining my entrancement in hide sight, it was the "glass", the color of this glass, the raise decoration that had been clearly and cleverly molded onto this once soft glass and that this same glass was now hard and brittle but one could still "feel" the molten elasticity in the molded decoration. Further, the form DID look like the box and painted turtles I found all the time only this was "OLD" "GLASS". I was smitten,

As a fifth grader, "FINDING OUT" about this "THING" was a long research road that ended up with the unsatisfactory position of… "FINDING OUT" the "what this is"… in a big thick book that …only had a tiny little drawing way in the back of it… among similar "flasks" and crummy black and white pictures of other "old flasks"… but not one like this one and … never getting nearer to the actual "IT" than rubbing my nose on the glass case… which disappeared after six months… and… enhancing this research by not mentioning to anyone my smitten entrancement. I don't even know how I found out about "the book" which was (and still is) the basic classic reference to American Historical and Pictorial Flasks: George P. and Helen McKearin, AMERICAN GLASS, Crown, NY, 1941. (One may easily find a copy of this classic reference.)


There was a brief blank period of… no flask in the library - research over. THEN …at the old antique shop (see post of that title)… an IDENTICAL FLASK appeared for sale for $65.00. AND I could handle it… all over… without ANY restrictions and even freely talk about it and KEEP ON handling it over and over and KEEP ON talking about it EACH and every time I went there. My learning curve LEAPED forward for the handling and the talking yielded a great deal of true facts about the "thing" and …deep, deep, deepest deep "feel" for the object. I was not only smittened and entranced but INFORMED… very quickly. Then, one day, the fruit jar saga took place and …wham - bang… the flask was in my bedroom.


This old bottle, correctly called a cornucopia and urn half pint American pictorial flask in olive green bottle glass, numbered GIII-7 mold pattern by McKearin and made in New England at either a Connecticut or New Hampshire glassworks between 1820 and 1835… still smittens and entrances me to this day.


For others… it does not.


Most of the others are "bottle" or "flask" collectors who consider this flask mold pattern and therefore all of the flasks made in this mold to be… very, very, very, very, VERY common. So common do they commonly consider it's 'so common' to be common that the flask, today as I write is a …nothing. Traveling up the cash value scale in the past forty years to a high of about $150., the flask has fallen back to a "findable at" price of my original $65.00 and even… fifty bucks. Most often one finds them "kicking around" in an antiques shop for "$125.00" and …not going anywhere fast. And that's it.


THAT LAST means that outside of the collector community …that is fully jaded… the little flask has no following. None. Except in old New England homes filled with old New England things that have "always been there" and "show good taste". Either one "knows" what it is or… does not. The latter means, in most cases, not even noticing it. To my eye it is STILL "HOW CAN ANYONE not NOTICE IT?". Even as I write this …with a specimen next to me… I ponder "HOW" can anyone NOT be… smittened and entranced.


The brittle molded glass; light, and so elastically formed yet now HARD. The deep dirty but …crispy clear… green color… caused by heating molten glass with firewood in the New England woods. The mold blown decorative process… used in the New England woods second to it's …only… first usage… by the Romans. The lost-forever- NONCHALANCE- make of the single flask, one of thousands of surviving examples… by a glass blower MAN… who puffed one small controlled breath down his blowpipe to form a bubble of molten glass… and his BOY who closed that bubble in an iron mold. Then the MAN raised the raw molded flask from the mold. The BOY attached an iron "pontil rod" to it's bottom (with molten glass) and the MAN snipped the molded glass free from the blowpipe. The BOY "fire polished" this jagged …top lip of the flask by… sticking the flask (top lip first) back into the furnace "for a second" and then "finished" by… breaking the pontil rod off with a pop. The BOY turned to find the MAN ready with another bubble of glass ready for the mold. They did this all day, every day. The finished flasks were peddled and sold by the dozen as "general purpose containers" to …anyone who would buy any. They were then filled with anything and just about everything and … sold, used and… NOT thrown out due to their very, very obvious positive art qualities that are best summarized as "I LIKE IT". The abundant and therefore "common" qualities of this cornucopia and urn half pint flask are due to the abundant number made and the …"I like it" preservation of the flask… ever after… in old New England homes.


Discover all of this oneself, hunt one of these… glass turtles… down, buy it, handle it and keep it around. The positive art qualities, the old glass qualities, the legacy qualities and the simple "I like it" will last you the rest of your life and return all of your cash outlay in cultural and art discovery. If one is interested in early New England decorative arts, this old glass object is an open door into learning about them. As a single decorative glass object… in the New England home… one sends a knowing message when one displays this …very proper, very subtle and very classic New England pictorial flask.

The Old Antiques Store

The Old Antiques Store

We drove by the old antiques store last month. We drive by it when we are in that area. The old store is not on the main road but is just a tenth mile off of it. This time we stopped and I took a photograph of it. The store has been abandoned and looked like the photograph for at least twenty-five years. It has been thirty-five years this past October since I did business there. It looked less overgrown and abandoned back then but still had the same "old store" appearance.


Today is August 15th, 2016. I last did business at the store in October, 1979. I went to the store for the first time in October of 1966. I was twelve. I went to the store with my soon-to-be Boy Scout assistant scoutmaster. I was a cub scout, soon to be a boy scout.  The assistant scoutmaster had interviewed a group of us prior to our joining his boy scout troop. At that interview, my interest in "antiques" had been voiced under "hobbies". This assistant scoutmaster had a strong interest in antiques too. His interest was more than a hobby. Through a continued conversation about my interest, he offered to take me to the store in the photograph and introduce me to the owner-antiques dealer with whom this scoutmaster did considerable business. We drove there after my dinner, in the dark, on an October school night. We ended up spending hours there. I didn't get home until very late but my mother, who "liked" antiques too, never said anything and seem very pleased that I "had a good time" and "liked antiques". That was my first visit.


Following the directions from my assistant scoutmaster I returned to the antiques store very soon, probably that weekend, WITH my mother. SHE liked the antiques she saw there and we spent hours there. Thereafter we would go to this antiques store every few weeks. 1967 began, I turned thirteen, I joined the boy scout troop and the assistant scoutmaster and I continued our antiques interest exchange. He introduced me to more adult men who "liked antiques". Some of these men knew my mother and that she liked antiques. Along with the men, I met adult women who "liked antiques". Before I knew it I was a member of a little circle of adults who liked antiques, went to this store and were always talking with each other. My interest in antiques expanded avidly and rapidly, helpfully nurtured by these adults. Meanwhile my grandmother had always been an antiques dealer.
Antiques to me at age twelve-turned-thirteen was …finding anything old… anywhere… bringing it home to my bedroom… keeping it… finding out what it was… sort of… and generally having all my other friends think I was weird (unless it was an old rusted rifle or sword). My bedroom filled with this "stuff". I was very protective of my "stuff". My mother never bothered me about my "stuff". I constantly arranged and re-arranged my "stuff" to feature my latest find and… I believe… she was impressed with this management. I never thought I ever found something good and have deeply considered this in hindsight. I believe now that I DID occasionally find something sort of "good" and THAT find… was purloined by my mother to become part of HER "stuff". SHE was constantly… finding anything old and bringing it home TOO, but it took me a few years to realize that "she's serious".


All of this changed one day in the spring of 1967. I had been "turned loose" (my mother's words) by my mother at my uncle's farm with his blessing to "go anywhere you want" and "can have any antiques you find". This was not the first time for this "turned loose" there and… it was a farm with six barn size outbuildings way out in the middle of nowhere and having been built in the 1820's. The setting as just described didn't mean much to me THEN for I considered "these old farms" to be "LIKE THAT" and "normal". The compounding of "this changed one day", unknown even to me, was that MY ability to "find antiques" was "growing leaps and bounds". What started as a nine year old's "curiosity" now blossomed into "THAT'S TOO MUCH WE CANNOT FIT IT IN THE CAR!" gathering processes. As my mother said: "Turned loose".


That day off I went and after several hours of rummaging, retrieving, bringing to show my mother and uncle and leaving in a pile next to the car… I was down on all fours creeping around the bottom of a stairs in an out building and …could just see through the stair crack a "bunch" of "old glass" behind that stairs. I crawled in-under and behind the stairs and retrieved three fruit jars and… skipped them over to the pile after showing them off and receiving just about as much interest in them as I had in them… except that I HAD seen the 1865 dates on the lids of the jars.


The fruit jars rode home, went to my bedroom and …languished. In about a week or so I talked with someone about something and somehow gained inkling that "old fruit jars" were "worth money". I resurrected the three jars, washed the three jars and put them on display… in my room. One jar was called "DEXTER" in print on it's front and this was surrounded by an embossed ring of fruit and vegetables. The other two jars were embossed "FRANKLIN DEXTER FRUIT JAR". After another week I went to the antiques store with my mother. There, in conversation, I told the dealer about my fruit jars. I told him about the one embossed "DEXTER". We left, two weeks went by, we went back and… in conversation… the dealer asked if I wanted to sell the fruit jar embossed "DEXTER". "No." I said  "I will pay forty-five dollars for it" he said. My mother's attention was had. MY attention was had. WE agreed to "SELL THE JAR" and "Bring it next weekend". We did. I had forty-five dollars in cash. I still had the other two fruit jars. The dealer didn't want them.
When we were home, later in the school week, my grandmother was visiting and heard the story from my mother. She hunted me down, congratulated me on the sale and asked "What are you going to do with the money?" I knew what I was going to do with it and told her right away that I "know where there is a historical flask I want that costs $65.00 and as soon as I can get another twenty dollars I am going to buy it." My grandmother… and I have never forgotten this… stood looking down at me for a moment and then… saying nothing… opened up her pocket book and gave me a twenty dollar bill.


I bought the flask. I had, until that day, a job as a paper boy delivering newspapers and a job mowing "peoples" lawns. "Peoples" were like my fourth grade teacher and… such. THAT DAY THAT ENDED and I became an "antiques dealer". That was 1967 and I was in seventh grade. I procured my state resale vendors license two years later in 1969 when I was in ninth grade. I have been an antiques dealer… and rare books dealer… ever since I found those fruit jars and sold the one at… the old antiques store.

Before and After: "The Sameness" - "So You're FOR Buttercups"

Before and After:  "The Sameness"

"So you're FOR Buttercups"

Seven years ago I started this antiquarian ‘writing down’ with a five post block presenting the antique New England pickle bottle.  I presented it as it is to me... now, then, back then, before, generations before, these days, those days and in my days... now. Where, when, how, who.  Too.  And... the constituent antique pickle bottle collectors, including their ‘must have – go to’ reference book... too.

            I have ‘gone back’ and read over the posts and so may anyone by pursuing the labels ‘old bottle’, ‘pickle bottle’ and ‘pickles’.  I did not change (edit) anything.  That I did not need... or want... to do.  I found the error that I had ‘occurred to me’ that caused me all this retro reading right away and then, too, found it to be a solid ‘error’ throughout all five posts.  The error is simple enough:  I never serve notice that the reason I choose old New England pickle bottles as the subject is because... it is easy.

            I felt then

            And feel now...

            I feel...

            That they (the antique New England pickle bottle) captures and encompasses all of what I have been writing down ‘ever since’ about New England antiques.  Their collectors, dealers and pickers.  The old New England homes, houses, homesteads, sheds, barns, outbuildings.  Stonewalls, ‘dumps’ and ‘hoard’.  Attics, cellars and summer kitchens.  Back stairs, windowsills, cellar stairs, woodshed windows, dirty barn windows.  Boys and girls playing in barns, sheds.  Wells and their well houses.  Old women and their preference for old pickle bottles in their windows.  Old men who tied bailing twine around a ‘pickle’s’ neck and ‘hung it’ in the center of a barn’s window.

             Dirty wooden boxes...and old cardboard paper boxes full of old dirty pickle bottles in the back of old rusted pickup trucks... hauling them to my yard to “SELL”

            “YOU”

            “THEM”.

            I never said why I picked that topic.  The old New England pickle bottle, when it is applied to my ‘subjects at hand’; the core directives of this blog; it is a very fine and easy choice...

            For it ‘covers all of it’ and

            “Never changes” too.

            In the original five posts I did, ‘pretty much’ cover... the all of it (about ‘pickles’)... without saying that; that ‘pickle bottle’ is an easy choice that covers.  The ‘never changes’ I bring in today.  To ‘bring in today’ I graciously say... in a reversing way... that the old New England pickle bottle

            Is not

            “Trending”.

            It stays where it is and that ‘stay’ comes from where it... was.

            As a candidate for exemplifying old New England decorative taste (“good taste”) of objects, designs, places, settings, inclusions, exclusions and... ‘sending the right message from the corners of the room’, the old New England pickle bottle ‘is that’.  In the posts, I notice the difference between the ‘cathedral’ pickle bottle and the plain pickle bottle as decorative preference and clout.  None the less... “BOTH” are “PICKLE  BOTTLES”.  Choose a ‘one’ or the other... or one ‘may have’ a ‘both’.  TOO.  Dirty in boxes in a picker’s truck.  Washed and “windowsilled” or “Manteled”.  The top of refrigerator is a popular spot too.  And there is too... the  old back stair’s hoard that I ‘grew up with’ in my grandmother’s home.  “That long ago” still stands today... and ‘started’ in the

            Civil War.

            Old New England pickle bottles were used as window decoration in the Civil War.  They were not ‘thrown out’.  They are a solid benchmark of ‘not trending’ ‘old New England’ decorative ‘taste’.

            The old pickle bottle is a shelter of old New England we may all ‘get to’.

            Today, all old pickle bottles and their various etiquettes are unchanged.  They are a little more ‘scarce’, a little more ‘hidden away’ in homes and collections, a little more expensive, a little more “not (for sale) today”.  A little bit more.

            Not a lot more.  No... everything there (“with pickles”) is ‘just fine’.  And no one ‘with pickles’ notices the ‘nots’.  No one brings their old pickle bottle that ‘came from my grandmother’ to ‘display’ at the Historical Society’s annual ‘Discovery night’.  The pickle bottle stays home... and guards the home.  They are still there when a ‘you’ gets back.  They are still there after an “I” (an antiques dealer) leaves the home... after a ‘visit’.  ONLY now and then when the inheritance is declared and the distributions ‘made’ do they falter and, briefly, ‘go in motion’.  I am always around to ‘catch them’ if they ‘fall’.

            The plain pickle may be the best ‘starter’ for the ‘home’.  It is a little less of a dollars and cents commitment... though that price gap has narrowed... so that ‘good ones’ ‘shadow’ the price of the cathedral pickle bottles.  These days.  I remember being ‘undone’ by a sixty dollar price on a ‘plain pickle’.  Now I encounter ‘one (hundred) twenty-five’ “stickered can you believe it?”.  Yes I can believe it.  That is cheap for a true ‘shelter of old New England’.  And it is too... a shelter that may be ‘passed down’ for generations.  One may count on doing that.  I already stated:  Old New England pickle bottles are not trending.  Neither is old New England.  In case you haven’t noticed.  Old New England is just as crouched down behind its stonewalls and Indian (chimney) stairs... as ever.  Old New England continues to ‘escape capture’.  I know because I fight in this war everyday

            Of my whole life.  I notice lots of old pickle bottles in this war.

            A strip mall based mowing – landscape ‘lawn care’ (weed whacking, leaf blowing, [“bark”] mulching and round-up defoliation) services with “HEY GUYS” guys riding the mowers, whacking, blowing, dozing the mulch, and squirting the ‘killer’ pose as the semblance of order standard for the

            New New England .  Semblance of order.  Pose.  Taste.  Declaration of taste.  Demonstration of taste.  Etiquette of taste.

            “If it runs on gasoline they have to have one”.

            “We just don’t do any of that”.

            “So your FOR buttercups?”

            That does not seem to have a lot to do with an old pickle bottle hanging by its neck in a shed window?  This is right.  It does not.  An old pickle bottle hung by its neck in a barn window is an old way of old New England decorative use of an old pickle bottle.  MOST ALL of those old pickle bottles have been taken down from their window and sold.  It is very rare to encounter ‘one hanging’ ‘anymore’.  But the “LAWN” is “PERFECT”.

            In old New England

            So to speak.

            And so is the pickle bottle.  If there is a ‘stoic’ and a ‘suggestion’... the old pickle bottles make them.  Are them.  Welcome to the eye and only ‘spotted’.  If one sees one then one is ‘a message from the corner of the room’ receiving.  If you do not see it... it is not there.  One must look for a ‘better spot’ and ‘try again’.  All this will make sense when one does see one ‘in the (old New England) wild’.  Stop and compare it to the ‘one’s I have at home’.

            If everything I do (with old pickle bottles) is done over and over... then I never have to do it ‘again’.  Over and over I have ‘old pickle bottle’ my life.  Fours years old.  Seven years old.  Thirteen years old.

            Now over six decades have passed.  Pickle bottles have not passed.

            Or changed.

            Not even slightly.  They are an absolute of old New England ‘sameness’.  No:  Not even ‘utterance’ has come from them.  To me.  Simple only... ‘sameness’.  Ever even where they are; on a windowsill... a china cabinet’s top.  A box in a truck.  Tied by its neck and hung in a window.  “LET ME WASH THEM FOR YOU.”

            “No”

            I want them dirty with their old dust dirty bailing twine nooses.  Soldiers in a war hung until dead from

            Spying

            From their barn window on every caller greeted at the front door.  Caller greeted at the shed door.  Even the barn’s door.  “USUALLY WE KEEP THE DOOR OPEN BUT THE NEIGHBORS CAT’S BEEN CATCHING THE

            BATS”.

            Didn’t think there was going to be a tomorrow did they.  I was going to take them down and let them breath again?  No... “NO... NOT TODAY I GUESS.  I WOULD MISS THEM YOU KNOW”.

            “How long do you think they’ve been (hanging) there?”

            “Oh those were there when I was a boy”.