Of Old Ink Pots.

 Beautiful things have often come into my life by default.  Such is the case with my ink bottles.

They are neither very old nor particularly rare & I only own a handful ~ exactly 5.  However...

When we first moved to the island we were the only house on our side of the point & I am an inveterate beachcomber, so naturally the first thing I did was clamber down our hill & scramble through the mangroves to poke & pry amongst the piles of sea grass & driftwood to see what had been caste upon the shore.

The clear glass ink bottles were discovered @ different times.  Wedged into the mud they have actually survived the ravages of time quite well & cleaned up nicely but in all honesty probably only date back to the 50's or early 60's because the ballpoint was invented in the 30's & by 1966, when I entered the 3rd grade, we phased from pen & ink to ballpoints by the end of 2nd term. Pity.  I loved working with the old pens.  They weren't pretty.  The nibs rusted & bent & the holders were ugly red plastic but when you wrote with them the ink did lovely things going thick & thin, dark to faint.  I know.  Small things...

For ages 3 clear ink bottles is what I had. Then when Jossie entered school I bought an old school desk ~ you know the ones: they had a sloping lid, hinged at the top so you could lift the lid & shove your belongings inside, a long groove cut above the hinges for pens or pencils & a hole in the exact middle of the groove.  I'm sure later generations wonder about that hole.  I didn't.  I wondered what had happened to the tin or enamel ink pot that had once rested there.

So I asked, as you do, the friends you know who are always @ the garage sales or the thrift shops, or the 2nd hand places if they would keep an eye out for an ink well ~ one that had once belonged in an old school desk.  And my friends, being my friends, arrived with ink bottles, teal & old & bottle green & though quite charming, useless as regarded the desk. I think they are pretty & not quite useless.  They hold feathers rather nicely.