I am interested in my own collection tendencies: glass, pottery, cats, witches, and poppies. The witches and poppies are a hold over from my love of The Wizard of Oz, I suppose, and my own reading and diving into witchcraft, past and present. Cats, particularly black cats, because I have three, one of which is black, and would have more if I had the space. Glass and pottery—it’s something about the textures of these materials. The light in and through the glass; the colors which change depend on the angle at which you are staring. The idea that pottery came from the earth, formed by clay and water and fire. Something magical in all of these processes and the resulting objects, at least for me.

I don’t know why other people collect. There is collecting and then there is hording, of course. Fine line. For myself, I like having beautiful and whimsical objects around me. Still have some perspective, though—if these things disappeared one day, I wouldn’t be lost. All of them are ephemeral—glass breaks, pottery shatters, poppies—at least the real ones—die back, even my cats, who I love fiercely, won’t be around forever, though some may live to twenty years or so. Beauty is a temporary state, and a changing one.

Even that which is dying can be beautiful. Sea glass had some practical use as bottles or other objects then went to rest in the water and became some other thing, frivolous but charming When I was Scotland, one day I visited an island out in the middle of the Firth of Forth, the location for a several hundred year old abbey. I tried to imagine a life in that lonely, cold, place, almost drowning in its bird population. I think it was possible to picture, however, because of all the sea glass and pottery I found on the shore there.

Green and brown mostly, some of it probably from bottles and windows. Earlier that week I saw original glass panes in a medieval house in Edinburgh—a translucent almost opaque green, similar to that in old Coke bottles, with a bulleted point or eye in the center of the glass. Possibly the source for some of the shards I collected?

Almost mistook a jellyfish washed up for a piece of glass, it was so translucent and delicate looking. Its stumpy, dangling tentacles got pushed around by the rivulets of water rushing up from the firth. Birds everywhere—gulls, herons, ducks and geese, and, if you were lucky, you might spy a puffin, rising and falling, a little knife cutting small paths through the water.

I couldn’t collect these things physically. Oh, I wanted to. I’m not a birder, but something in me wanted to take home the puffins and the abbey with its walls crumbling into the channel and the small stone house, shaped like a pup tent, for the brothers who lived there and the driftwood and glass and clay pot shards. I did take a few shards and shells with me.