I’ve been on a purging kick lately. Last week I found a case of wine, minus two or three bottles, I bought when I moved into my house seven years ago. I have an odd relationship with wine. I don’t like the taste or the smell of it, but I love the labels. I love standing in the wine aisle and selecting a bottle – or, more accurately, a label design – to bring along if I’m going to someone’s house for dinner. So, I thought seven years ago, why not have a case on hand, ready to go? That, of course, took all the fun out of it, so the box remained beneath the stairway right where I’d left it. On trash day I had some spare room in my can so I carried four bottles out on Friday morning and put them in. Then, watching the garbage man toss the bottles into his roaring truck one by one, employing the same gestures as horseshoes players, I felt guilty for not recycling. So I dug through my utensil drawer and found a corkscrew.
As best I can tell, the corkscrew is made of wood and metal. It doesn’t require electricity. It doesn’t have computer chips embedded in it, it didn’t require a manual and it’s so unobtrusive it’s survived a dozen or more moves, hidden enough to avoid the donation box but evident enough that I knew, somehow, of its existence.
Friday morning was on the cool side, the sun’s glow stretching across the floors in my house with a sharpness that seems to come only in September, when the weight of summer’s heat has been cleared out of the atmosphere. I stood at my counter, opening bottle after bottle, content in a way I haven’t been in a long while. What intrigued me the most was the fact that as my turns drove the screw down into the cork, the cork rose up and through the neck of the bottle. How, I wondered as my kitchen filled with the aroma of past-prime wine, does that work? I was simultaneously pushing down and pulling up. I would have been happy to stand there opening bottles all day, no technology, no so-called innovation, happily free of anything that could be mistakenly referred to as progress.
As best I can tell, the corkscrew is made of wood and metal. It doesn’t require electricity. It doesn’t have computer chips embedded in it, it didn’t require a manual and it’s so unobtrusive it’s survived a dozen or more moves, hidden enough to avoid the donation box but evident enough that I knew, somehow, of its existence.
Friday morning was on the cool side, the sun’s glow stretching across the floors in my house with a sharpness that seems to come only in September, when the weight of summer’s heat has been cleared out of the atmosphere. I stood at my counter, opening bottle after bottle, content in a way I haven’t been in a long while. What intrigued me the most was the fact that as my turns drove the screw down into the cork, the cork rose up and through the neck of the bottle. How, I wondered as my kitchen filled with the aroma of past-prime wine, does that work? I was simultaneously pushing down and pulling up. I would have been happy to stand there opening bottles all day, no technology, no so-called innovation, happily free of anything that could be mistakenly referred to as progress.
