Category: Bottles of Hours

Day 2: Love Notes

At the bottom of the valley across the field from my woods runs a creek. I imagined that I took an hour every day to roll a love note scroll-like and gently slide it into one of the glass bottles waiting on the rack on the wall.

Some days I might send a story. Some days maybe a photo or secret might go. I would carefully seal it, and wrapping it in wishes for good fortune, carry it to the stream and let it go where ever it was destined to go.

I liked that picture.

I often think in images. Seems efficient. Images can capture so much in one flash.

So this is my second love-note. And here you are, reading it.

Perhaps it was meant to be.

Day 1 – 99 Bottles of Hours on the Wall

Well, after this one’s done. This one is the first, leaving only 99 more.

It all started when I was scrolling through an old external hard drive in search of something in particular. In the process, I happened across a folder named “100 Day Challenge.” I didn’t have time to travel down any old rabbit holes just then, but the title has pestered me ever since. I have a vague memory of it reviving my writing after a long, long drought. It doesn’t matter. Sometime I’ll see it. Or not. What matters now is that its mere title, “100 Day Challenge,” has prompted me to ask myself , “With what would I like to be challenged right now? To what would I be willing to commit myself to daily action for 100 days?” Gosh, a hundred days would take me to the verge of spring, get me through the winter.

I told myself as I headed into mid-fall that when I had accomplished all that stuff on my do-list, I could paint. So I’m going to do some of that. I decided I would set up in my bedroom, transforming it into my winter studio. I could look down to the west through the window, to see the passing traffic on the road and the lilac bush with its chickadees and titmice and jays. Yesterday I ordered a card table I could paint on. It will be here by the end of the week and I’ll indulge my inner painter.

But not every day for 100 days. Just often.

I want to put my 100 days into adding a daily something to Notes from the Woods, as I originally intended. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. I have a sense of how it can go Today, just after I started writing this, I heard Jim Croce singing ever so quietly from a far away room in the back of my mind. “If I could put time in a bottle . . . ”

That’s when the image formed of a stack of empty bottles in a simple pine rack on the wall, each one waiting to be sent on its mission.

So that’s how this Bottles stuff started.

Image by chris18769 from Pixabay