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Dad was clearing out the shed of old bottles - the remnants of his collections of milk bottles, and old soda bottles, century-old medicine bottles that we used to dig up in ancient Pennsylvania dumps, overgrown with forest.  I took the best ones, figuring I could get them stowed away before Monica returns from Japan.  And Dad says they're probably done with canning, so I took four boxes of jars, quarts and pints, some salvaged in turn from the end of my grandmother's canning career nearly 30 years ago.  I'll return some in the autumn filled with applesauce or sauerkraut.

I left him and his indebted grandson to deal with the rest.

I dug up some of his bergamot and took some of the potted milkweeds he's grown from seed.  And a poorly placed black walnut sapling that started dying as soon as I dug it out, bare-rooted.  Still, I'll put it in the Rhode Island ground and see.

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