Antique Bottles

What happens when your main sewer line collapses? You replace it, of course. You bite the bullet, and figure out how to pay for that ridiculously expensive project because YOU don't want to poop in a bucket.

That's about the most excitement I've been faced with these last couple months, as long as we can all agree that blogging about the stresses of school is almost as exciting as learning the about the circulatory system (in other words: not so).

Sewerline project started earlier this week, and began with the traumatic removal of the ornamental garden that I so lovingly planted last summer.

The lilac bush, which was doing SO well, is now looking very dismal on the edge of a miniature mountain of soil. My entire front yard is layered in dirt. I have no lawn to speak of. Upside to that is that it removes the chore of mowing from our endless list of to-dos. (Always look on the brightside!)

As our contractor dug further today, he discovered that we have a giant slab of concrete about 6 feet under our lawn. Turns out, it's a driveway, which once lead to our now basement, which - apparently - was once a garage! Amazing, the history that unfolds when you excavate under the yard of a 99-year-old home.

Furthermore, there are "piles.... and piles....... and piles...." (Keith) of glass bottles buried under our yard on top of the old driveway. Keith put his arm into a nervously crumbling wall of foundation, 8 feet under the level of the grass, and felt an endless stack of glass bottles under there. He removed a few, but finally realized our whole yard might collapse if he dug them all out. Hey, at least there were no dead bodies! :o)

Can I just give a shout-out to the people of the distant past who thought it was a good idea to bury their trash? Yeah. Turns out, you were wrong.

Wow. If there is any giant lesson to be learned from this, it's that whatever we do to our surroundings today... look... some poor individual in the future is bound to discover what we did and curse us. Probably with a balled up fist, shaking to the sky. We don't want that now, do we?

But (again, because the bright side is always fun to look at) we did get some cool old bottles to admire. Most of them, I must point out, appear to be wine bottles. Oh my! Such lushes the previous owners must've been! But, that's okay. If I didn't have a recycling service to pick up my bottles every week, it would reveal me to be the pot calling the kettle black.

My favorite discovery is this old beer bottle.

The Alt Heidelberg from Columbia Beweries. When I told my mom the brand over the phone, she replied, "They don't make that anymore, do they?" With an air of understanding, as though maybe she was familiar with this beer in her past. Mother? Am I insinuating too much?.... I kid. Mother, I know you're perfect.... I just have to stir up a controversy because that's just what I'm good at. (xoxo) But mom was right (aren't they always right?)! Columbia Breweries closed in 1979. We assume all the bottles to date around 1940, because that's the age of the old, broked Coca Cola bottle we found. Now that's some old trash!