Objects from a well

I am brain dead like I always am after a flight. We got home late this afternoon. Watched 4 episodes of Seinfeld on the laptop on the plane. Saw Gotland and the Archipelago from the window. There were lots of boats going by which were small white specks.

It's summer here now, 28 degrees or more. The lilacs are out, and lilacs are one of my favorites.

Greece and Sweden are a mixed up soup in my head right now. One minute I'm still swimming in that clear water, looking at fish. The next I'm here- tired but restless, watching the water, boats, the slow, long light of June. Then there's the airplane like a tear through the middle of it. Now this trip has reached the stage where it begins to exist in memory. Certain details swim up to the surface, others are already sinking and settling. Travel can be so dreamlike. Was here real? Was there real? Can they really both be real at the same time? So much in so many places is real at the same time.

I keep thinking about this one collection of objects at a museum in Athens, 4 glass cases containing the found contents of a well that was in use from 1000 B.C. until 100 A.D. There were all manner of buckets and jugs and lanterns, a spoon made of bone, a key, nutshells, fruit pits, seashells, and a pair of dice. You can imagine so many different stories behind those objects. Which ones were dropped by mistake and which on purpose? Maybe a young girl who dropped her lantern when she went to draw water walked home, stumbling, in the dark. Maybe someone spent the whole day thirsty after they lost their bucket. Maybe someone threw the key down the well after locking a door or a chest, something which would maybe be locked for hundreds of years, or FOREVERMORE. Of course the fruit pits were thrown, not dropped, likewise the nutshells. Just a guy walking along having a snack, say, 2500 years ago. Whoever it was, I'm sure they would never have thought that the peach pit they casually threw into the well would be gazed upon, thousands of years later, in a glass case, by us, the people OF THE FUTURE.