Coins, credit cards long expired, eye shadow, cassette tapes, prescription bottles, a drill bit, a rusted bolt, a functional pair of pliers, soda can pull tabs, a 1986 Barry Manilow medallion from Caesars Palace, a whiskey flask, condoms—new and used, a VW car key, a crushed harmonica, a two-burner stovetop frame, a fully intact triangular car window, its edges rounded and smooth, broken beer bottles, a digital watch, toy soldiers, a gold clutch purse, a blown glass pipe, a clay pipe, a copper pipe, countless defunct lighters, hypodermic needles, pencils that have returned almost to twigs: digging in the meadow often feels distinctly archaeological.
The trowel rings against something metal—a fragment from a sculpture or a random piece of hardware? It’s rare not to catch a glint of glass at some point in turning over a bed. Even after seven years of working the soil in the meadow, I am always adamant with students and volunteers in telling them never to dig with their hands. There’s always the chance of coming upon a gnarly shard of glass, even in very prepared beds.
The meadow is a public space and the relics we find are traces of what transpires here day and night. These objects invite narrative.
Who stashed this now disintegrated blue-striped tube sock barely holding its treasure of coins in the bed along Francisco Street just where the wall is low enough to reach up? Did they plan to come back for it? In the long beds along the Jones Street wall, we have dug up wallets, worn from years in the soil, perhaps tossed up from the sidewalk after being emptied of their contents. Whose hotel key found its way here and remained for decades until a student set out one day to plant some iris bulbs?
And what sort of revelry on a Friday night leaves, in its trail, the plush cow costume we found one bright Saturday morning, dank and deflated at the bottom corner of the meadow?
GL
The trowel rings against something metal—a fragment from a sculpture or a random piece of hardware? It’s rare not to catch a glint of glass at some point in turning over a bed. Even after seven years of working the soil in the meadow, I am always adamant with students and volunteers in telling them never to dig with their hands. There’s always the chance of coming upon a gnarly shard of glass, even in very prepared beds.
The meadow is a public space and the relics we find are traces of what transpires here day and night. These objects invite narrative.
Who stashed this now disintegrated blue-striped tube sock barely holding its treasure of coins in the bed along Francisco Street just where the wall is low enough to reach up? Did they plan to come back for it? In the long beds along the Jones Street wall, we have dug up wallets, worn from years in the soil, perhaps tossed up from the sidewalk after being emptied of their contents. Whose hotel key found its way here and remained for decades until a student set out one day to plant some iris bulbs?
And what sort of revelry on a Friday night leaves, in its trail, the plush cow costume we found one bright Saturday morning, dank and deflated at the bottom corner of the meadow?
GL
Secondary Connections
