Green Glass, Green Leaf

The illumination of green in the sun; the vibrance of new grass, buds on trees, leaves unfurling.  Spring has swept into the crevices of winter, and is flinging green shoots and stems from May’s pockets.  Another season of brief all-in-a-hustle has arrived; migrating birds have come and gone on to nesting sites, blue robin’s egg shells and the mottled brown of a cardinal’s lay empty on the ground; leeks are pushing their broad leaves up and up amid trillium, mandrake, and jack-in-the-pulpits, signaling gathering time. The brightest greens which are the flowers of the maple trees will soon fall, just as the white- rosey pink dappled petals heavy from the branches of apple and pear follow.

The thickness of a soda glass bottle is substantial, necessary to hold the carbon dioxide forced inside the liquid, until that is released by opening the cap; it is also needed to withstand the pressures of the bottling process, and have the ability to be reused.  You won’t see a square soda bottle, it couldn’t hold, too many weaker areas; a cylinder is much stronger.  When formed, the liquid glass rounds against the mold naturally, eliminating sharp changes in direction, providing additional inner strength to the vessel.  People have come to expect a heft of glass which gives the pleasure of weight in hand, of holding something sure; thick glass also retains the refrigerated chill longer.  Elevate a green bottle to the light and rays cast pullulations of lime-colored pools to the ground; the rim holds a flickering green genie inside; better for you than drinking out of plastic anyways.  The taste is clear in stable glass, the bottle is mercifully silent.

Today my son Brian and I went to an old shale quarry that is now owned by a geological society, just 18 minutes from where I live.  The previous owners had removed enough shale that the compressed layer, which was once a muddy bottom of an ocean 380 million years ago, was exposed.  In that saline bathwater uncountable forms of life swam or not, while pieces of land jigsawed together to form North America and the other continents, at the time mostly located in the southern hemisphere. Parts that formed the ocean floor were pushed up by tectonic pressures into land exposed to air, so the first fish had something to walk on.

But all the little things that lived at the bottom died there as well, so when the intense, Gargantuan forces heaved land masses upwards, the remains of ocean life were also lifted into the Devonian atmosphere under pounds of mud.  Some are not fossilized, but remain as shell; to hold a tiny, delicate cup that is 380 million years old is a bit of a shiver.  A happiness.  Some still catch the light in a yellowed translucence, others exhibit iridescence, or pyritization.  Some have become stone imbedded within stone, but each infinite detail is recorded in rock, leaving a calling card species by species.

We trotted with a rented bucket and two rock hammers, a chisel, safety goggles, and a mallet. One of the geologists at the site took us to the area where the brachiopod layer was exposed, and as after the winter melt, there were several nice specimens of  Atrypa just laying on the ground.  Digging into the grey, hardened muck of ancient oceans brought out Spiriferida and Strophomenida, odd adaptive animals that appear to be related to clams yet are not.  Nope, not clams.  The shell material is different, and they fed by sweeping bits of food into their mouths with tentacles, then disappeared about one hundred million years before the great dinosaur extinction, in a hiccup that is supposed to have killed 90% of all species.  We filled the bottom of a bucket with brachiopods, and mid the flat plain of the quarry small sprouts of new plants were pushing through the cracked mud.  Birds sang, families had brought children out to dig, the geologists manning the entry kept asking about Brian’s idea of fossil wedding favors.  The bride is okay with this?  Where did he find her?  News that someone is interested in the local fossils made them go home feeling like progress is being made.

We drove back along the green waters of Lake Erie, green for the sake of a limestone bed which extends into the Niagara River.  The particulates give the water a hue, the hardness clogs up shower heads; we get plenty of limestone in our drinking water.  Lowering sunlight reflected a million wavelets in the lake, as the treasures which existed about the same time as starlight left the furthest stars bounced softly in paper toweling.  What we see at night no longer exists in the same position, for that light left the visible stars hundreds of years ago, and reaching further with mechanical assistance, it could be millions, right when these little creatures were anchoring themselves with pedicles to a semi-saltwater floor.  It takes over a half hour for the sunlight to bounce from Jupiter to the Earth. Time.  Is there a Speed of Time?

In small areas of the fossil beds, shards of glass sparkled atop the clay; the site has trouble with local kids hanging out at night, drinking.  Clear, brown, blue, and green crescent shaped edges lay like polished gems, all worn down from winter erosion; come the warm summer nights, a fresh littering will appear. Pretty, but for the ground holding eons of prehistory, totally unnecessary.

Looking up, you may see the oxygen sixty miles up glowing green as the Aurora Borealis, and once I saw the green curtains hanging in the midnight sky, a dull crackling sound emitted as the lines slowly waved and undulated.  The show did not last long, eventually dissolving into green clouds, then phantoms; we don’t get to see them at this latitude, and I only remember seeing the red and blue ones when I was quite small.  My parents got me up out of bed to watch the flashes of light, the dulling pinks and reds reminded me of a minor sunset.  But my favorite are the green; what causes the movement, the form?  Someday I will find them, but for the present, a glass bottle catching the sun, a stem of new burdock rising in a field, the vibrant spring greens roiling from tree to grass to leaf, the dangerous currents of the river that travels north to the Falls now free of ice; they will have to do.

Green oh green, how glad we are to welcome you back to daily life, your plants oxygenating the air, the living things that cannot be without you.  Bees and butterflies, rat snakes and rabbits and us.  You clarify the evening air, and send stories of night over the sill, pulling our senses into a time of when.  Depths of eons, of fiery stars and creatures within my palm that lived 380 million years ago.  Good night, good night, sleep without counting.  Just be.