mud pies to medicine: Mason Jars

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Mason Jars

They are everywhere these days. I was at an antique shop and hit the jackpot and couldn't believe I had never noticed the shelf before full of old mason jars. The shop keeper informed me that they can't keep them on the shelves. They get them in all the time and people come in same day and buy them out. A lot of wedding centerpieces are using old mason jars. I've also seen soap dispenser tutorials and lids that make them into to-go cups. Not sure what I'm doing with mine yet besides that pictures of them. I love the blue color on the old ones. A little Wikipedia factoid- older mason jars were tinted colors (like the blue seen below) because it was thought to better preserve food by blocking out some of the light. Learn something new everyday. My sister will probably be using a lot of them in her wedding since her fiance is a mason, you know like bricks and stuff. This of course begs the question, why are they called mason jars to being with? Looks like someone by the last name mason actually patented the design.

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The inspiration you ask?

I miss making mud pies. There is this huge rock in my front yard. To call it a rock really does it a dishonor. It is a boulder, brought home by my father on a huge dump truck after he blasted it out of a work site. My mom one day told me that even though it is nearly 2.5 feet high, 6 feet long, and 2.5 feet wide, that it was, in fact, only half-showing. The scientist inside of me was disbelieving and set out to get some proof. Clad in a dress, bow in my hair, and my best accessory, a shovel, I trudged outside ready to prove my mother wrong. That is when the digging began. I dug, and dug, and dug, and nearly all 3.5 feet of Danielle fit in that hole when I had reached the bottom of the rock. That became my digging spot, my mud pie kitchen. Each day it was dug, and each evening it was filled back in. Sometimes the holes were small, sometimes they were enormous, and most days the hole was turned into my mud mixing bowl with that rock as my counter. The novelty never wore off. The ebb and flow of my childhood was, in many ways, measured by the ever-changing depth of that hole in the front yard, the hole that never really disappeared even each day after it was filled in. Even though the grass has grown back in that spot, there still remains, an indentation, the scars of a childhood well lived and the disbelieving scientists I have always been.

So, you ask me why I want to be a doctor? I do not want to be a doctor. I want to open a mud pie bakery with the cash register on that rock in my front yard. But, somehow, I doubt I would stay in business long, for the world seems to have lost its taste for mud pies. I guess being a doctor will have to do.