A Tuesday meditation

Don't worry. It's not deep and it's short.

I have a weirdly-shaped tiny yard that’s basically as landscaped as I’m going to landscape it, but there’s this 21-foot boundary at the property line of the oil company next door that just kind of drops off. Last year, I built a garden and my son built a patio there, but it needs something creative to keep you from looking off into a kind of dull alley.

I woke up one morning thinking of how much I love glass, and how cool it would be to make something like this:

This is a rookie wall. All the literature says don’t use clear bottles.

Of course, I thought I’d come up with the idea, myself, pulling up some dim hillbilly memory of someone who used what they had on hand to create art. I was a little sad that not only was there this photo, but multiple instructions as to how to create such a wall.

So I put out a request on Facebook for colored-glass wine bottles. I’m not a drinker but I love colored glass and I explained what I intended to do and asked for input — both ideas and bottles. I got some great ideas about how to actually build this, and that same day, my neighbor Audrey came walking up with a bag of wine bottles clinking in a bag. A woman named Diana said she’d just had a party, and offered to leave her empties in front of her house for the next time I was in her neighborhood (which turned out to be last Wednesday). And then Gary, of Chateau Le’ Gari, a beautiful Marlborough winery, said he could load me up and I should stop by.

I used to live in Marlborough, and was thrilled to let Gary, who grew up, as I did, in the church of Christ, share nearly 30 bottles. We chatted like old friends (fundamentalists know one when they see one) and I teased him that he must have had a hard time convincing the folks back in Louisiana that making award-winning wine was cool with Jesus. He said he’d gotten into such discussions with his Pentecostal mother about that, and he told her he was strictly following in Jesus’ footsteps. (Jesus, after all drank and even produced some wine, Himself, and I’m not sure when our clan decided we’d not).

Anyway. People have offered all over to drink up for me, and the tavern down the street said they’d save their bottles (I’d called the day after the recycler came), as well.

Here I am, soaking the labels off the bottles, which, as the instructions warned, has turned out to be the hardest part of this process so far. Fortunately, Chateau Le’ Gari’s labels come off easily.

I love summer projects and have had a variety of them, from scraping ugly red paint off a backyard shed to the afore-mentioned patio to putting up spite fences and building a retaining wall.

I’ve enlisted the help of my friend Elizabeth (who is far more artsy than I) to drill a hole in the bottom of each of these bottles. I’m buying the — rebar, I guess — in the next week, burying them in concrete, and then loading these bottles up (after placing washers in the necks to keep the water out). My husband mentioned I should think about resale. Is there a would-be homeowner who might be turned off with this hillbilly art? Well, if there is, I wouldn’t want them to live here, anyway.