Bottle House

 
 
 
Flowers The day begins with flowers, at the entrance, beneath the windows, flowers everywhere, a delicacy of scent. Beyond the flowers, more flowers, then playthings in the garden, a child’s paradise, these sculptured faces, this glass among the trees, sun and shade, the fountain’s water, this dream of an old man, kept alive now by his children, a dream of health and sanity and peace out by the bay, where the mud red waters roll and the tide’s hand grasps at the land and pulls it down with watery fingers ...
 
Faces Everywhere: faces and elements of faces; a nose, eyes, a mouth, open in surprise ... wooden faces, glass faces, pottery faces, flesh and blood faces ... grandma’s face, grandpa’s face ... the grandchildren ... tourists travelling, old islanders returning, to see family and friends ... islanders returning to visit the almost forgotten farms which their families worked a generation or three ago before the exodus from the land ... “This was grampy’s house!” they say or “That was my grandmother’s farm!” as if a life could be reborn in that pointed finger, those casual words ... how many memories are snapped in each picture? How many lives are caught in this snapping of the fingers as the past is instantly summoned and perfection is bottled for a second or two in the magic of this house, this garden, where the builder’s spirit roams. Sit still awhile; be silent: you may hear him breathing, glimpse him, for a second, staking out the flowers, extracting a weed, checking the set of the concrete foundations, polishing a bottle, resting on a wooden seat, avoiding the slow snail on the path, bejewelled by rain-drops from the trees or spray from the fountain ... for where there are flowers, there must be water and rain and peace and happiness and all good things, glimpsed darkly through smoked glass yet grasped so smoothly in the sun’s bright light ...

This is the house of bottles, the glass house, where rough winds are shunned and the bottles are set in concrete. It is a museum of light and dark, the creation of sun and shadow as sunshine falls and the flashlight reverberates from glass to stone and back again. Shapes, shadows, memories  curved and carved in glass, set in glass, this shimmering beacon this glass house, this light house built as a heaven haven for harboured ships and the soul’s refreshment, here, in these gardens, among these bottles, and at the chapel door, an angel in waiting ...