These empty glass jars.
I want my home to look like the person inside it is real.
I am collecting empty glass jars on my kitchen window. They tell me about a life well lived. One that involves pasta sauce, jam, hot cocoa. There’s a stick of sage in one. Rubber bands tangled in the belly of another. Sometimes I tilt the lids so it looks accidental, hurried even. I bought an aesthetic chilli oil, because the sill was missing a particular size. The jars and I know there is nothing cavalier about how I make a home. How comfortable they are performing ease.
The glass wouldn’t tell you my mum used them to make bolognaise because I could barely leave the house.
I wouldn’t either.
She put the jar upside down because she didn’t know the rules.
I don’t anymore either.
I haven’t put it face up though, the original design I had in mind looks too neat. I want my home to look like the person inside it is real.
To have empty jars on windows means, by definition, that they were once full. That their insides were digested, transformed, and discarded. Rinse, repeat. Rinse again.
Sometimes the lids don’t fit after the dishwasher, sometimes they are lost in the process of repurposing, or they belong to something else now. I find another seal.
There are months you don’t think you’ll survive and window sills that look bare but slowly slowly slowly there’s another empty glass jar.
Occasionally I'll leave a spoon or fork lying sideways across them, how terrifying to think life can just swallow you up from where you were buttering bread or eating soup in the sun. There is one jar with the remnants of cocoa and dark winter.
Remind me to scrub that harder next time.
I’ve thought about propagating plants. It feels too exposing to nurture things inside jars that have touched such emptiness. Is it okay just to grow things without a vision for a garden? To fill such a hollow place with someone alive. I don’t know if I could wash them again if roots died inside them. Glass is safer I suppose, but I can’t help but yearn for something soft on the insides. I think about making pesto but the empty takes up so much room already, how would sauce fit?
The glass jars just keep piling up. I see sun catch the rim and scatter onto my fingerprints while I fill the sink. The chilli oil jar needs hot water. Remind me to put washing liquid on the grocery list.
All my love, C x