Blue Mason Jar Filled with Imagination

What I would keep in a mason jar

First, I have to say something about the jar--the jar would be blue the old pale blue ones not the new blue ones modeled to imitate the old ones. It’d be a blue jar with one of those wire frames and it would have a matching glass lid.  Or maybe it would be one of those with a screw-top lid, I think those lids were made of nickel or something odd, maybe galvanized tin.  They turned an interested mottled grey and not quite grey color over time.  And they felt funny like they were absorbing your fingers when you touched them.  The jars would be placed in a wooden box, one of those like they used to put bottles of soda in, with slats and sometimes they stuck on paper labels to advertise the contents. Over time the labels broke apart into fragments of curled and fading paper.

Oh, in the bottle?  I’d keep bottle caps from other bottles, jacks (I used to play jacks; no one taught me the rules so I used to make up my own games), erasers, lentils (brown ones and yellow ones), a tiddly-wink, a cat whisker and a piece of cat toenail (they shred bits and pieces all the time.  Look on your carpet, you’ll find one, most likely).  Maybe that little girl from To Kill a Mockingbird (Scout?).  I suppose she wouldn’t fit, so maybe a feather from a blue jay to remind me of her.  A piece of clear, broken glass.  I’d like to pull off the cover of a novel, tear a small piece off, and roll up like a handmade cigarette.  Then what would I do with the book?  You know how you come across books that say please don’t buy this book if the cover has been removed because the author will not be paid.  I’ve bought books like that, gotten them home, and only then had the sad realization that the author didn’t get paid.  I wondered what to do, not buy used paperbacks at flea markets anymore?  Scold the sellers?  Put fifty cents in dimes in an envelope and mail it to the author?  The jar, right.  A cicada shell, because that would be an interesting conversation piece.  One of the tokens from a monopoly set, the iron or the wheelbarrow.  A deadly weapon from a game of clue—the candlestick.  

Oh, a plastic dinosaur because that would remind me of a good friend from college I lost track of. She had a boyfriend who sent her big boxes of plastic dinosaurs, in all colors and sizes. Today I learned that there never was such a thing as a brontosaurus.  I’m serious.  It was a confabulation.  Is that the word?  I’d include a scab from the psoriasis on my left elbow.  It would break down over time, decay until there was just a smidgeon of dust.  Maybe a spider would get in the jar, climb its way down amongst all this detritus of my imagination and find the dust, maybe it would eat it.  And then shazzam, it would explode and ten thousand paper spiders would burst out of its carapace and they’d all climb the sides of the jar and run down its sides and be gone lickety-split faster than you could count the hairs on a pig.