The mason jars line one of my office bookshelves. Seven in all. Seven, like the major chakras. Seven, as in my favorite number. One holds colored glass marbles that I have found or bought in junk stores. Some of those marbles have been rescued from old board games. Rust red or milky white, they peer at me with the eerie look of glass eyes. Another jar holds only
blue things—found stones or beads once set free from a chain, only to be caught again and contained, while the largest jar is stuffed with hundreds of folded gum wrappers—Teaberry and Wrigley’s Spearmint, Beech Nut— the flavors of my childhood. When I was young, my sister and our two best friends Laura and Dianne spent dozens of Saturdays fashioning wrappers, found, stolen or bought, into a 28-foot chain. That unfinished chain now sits in a box in our basement. We had planned to make it hundreds of feet then enter it in the Guinness Book of World Records, but ultimately turned our attention and weekends to other things like boys and growing up. Dianne died of cancer the week before my son was born. I was swollen with life at her funeral, and when I look at that jar of colorful folded wrappers, I remember to live, to finish things. A fifth jar contains white rocks. A sixth holds shells and sea glass, bringing the ocean into my every day. The seventh jar has both the dullness and shine of fifty one-dollar coins. Round. Heavy. Gold. I sit one in my palm. I feel its warmth. And I wonder what I am really looking for.