Sifting for bottles together never gets old – it’s the idea that something so fragile could have survived for so long in one piece and in one place

My family and I have a weird hobby. We like to dig for old bottles. It’s something we stumbled upon, quite literally, one soggy weekend.

On a visit to the family farm, we were exploring a shady gully below the house, where an occasional creek meandered down the hill. One of the kids tripped on a jutting ridge in the mud. Dug up and sluiced out, the object revealed itself to be a round, honey-hued medicine bottle.