treasure none-the-less...

I was fascinated with the idea of finding treasure in my boyhood.  I still am.  I was always looking for a message in a bottle on the lakeshore with a treasure map directing me to a buried treasure left by ancient pirates, or a package dropping off the back of a truck filled with unmarked hundred dollars bills, etc.  I really thought I would discover some hidden loot, some spoil from some war in some epoch of time.  Filthy lucre minus the filth.

I was convinced that this one stretch of shoreline would be the place of my life changing discovery, that my "ship would come in" so to speak.  I would throw bottles with messages in them out into the crashing waves fully expecting a response that would lead me to my next clue.  It took me a while to realize that the bottles would simply hit the water and float back to shore in a matter of ten minutes, powerless to fight the lake's relentless current.  Regardless, I would pluck the bottle from the surf and read the message inside to see if it had been responded to.  It never was, to state the obvious.  But I never tired in my attempts to contact signs of life out there in the vast blue sea.

I would scour the shoreline looking for gold, jewels, artifacts, items from sunken ships, hoping beyond hope that I would stumble upon something treasured.  For years I would pace this 150 ft. shoreline turning over rocks, picking up driftwood, and combing through sand with my fingers looking for buried goodies.  

I found what I thought were jewels of all colors lining the shore, undiscovered.  I would collect these colorful jewels in a little sack and then hide it under a big rock behind a big tree.  Little did I know that these jewels of all colors were nothing more than little shards of glass.  Glass primarily from beer bottles that had been reluctantly pushed ashore by years and years of wavy persistency.  A perfect war/storm between reluctance and persistence creates beautiful jewels, worthless jewels, but beautiful nonetheless.  These shards of glass had been filed down into smooth, rounded, colorful gems that looked like rubies and emeralds and diamonds.  I didn't know the difference.  To me, they were.

Dry, they looked shabby and cloudy.  But man-oh-man, when you baptize them in water they emerged with a brilliant shine and a vibrant sheen.  I collected those shards for years until I had the equivalent of a treasure chest full of them.  I  realized years latter that I was harvesting the remains of many, many drunken revelries, bottles broken over heads and tossed overboard with environmental hostility.  

Which goes to prove that one man's junk is another man's jewel.

How do they say it...one man's trash is another man's treasure.  My treasure.