Thursday, January 17, 2008

A Child's Garden of Glass

When I was a kid I had dozens of these little glass "trees" to play with. They were heavy crystal and none of them ever got broken or even chipped. Most of the play stories started out like this: Some sort of doll/toy wanders into The Snow Queen's crystal forest. They reflected the surface they sat on, which lead to finding interesting surfaces for them, and a lot of daydreaming. They could be spun like tops, too.






I lost most of these stoppers over the years, and the bottles, too. Running up and down the hilly terrain of Prospect Park, we'd pretend we were soldiers during WW2 who just happened to have crystal canteens.









My mother, her friends and my aunts kept me supplied with these bottles, The paper labels wore off fairly easily. They had once held Chypre 53, Vol de Nuit, Shalimar, Lui, and L'Heure Bleue but empty they provided hours of fun.