My object is a very old Gerber Baby Food Jar, with mashed peas listed on the label. But it's filled with grey ash. The label is pealing off and the lid of the jar is gold colored metal. The label is blue colored with white writing on it. It's got an expiration date in 1980. It's about half way filled with the grey ash and half with air. I now keep it stored on a decorative shelf in my apartment. I pick it up now and then to look at it and show other people.
When I was helping my mom clean out my grandma's house (after we had moved grandma to an assisted living place) I came across this old baby food jar filled with grey dirt. I asked my mom why grandma was storing a tiny jar of dirt, I knew grandma was losing it, but seriously!? But the jar looked really old, like grandma had chosen to store this a long time ago when she was still all there. My mom told me that it was volcanic ash that my grandpa had put in one of my brother's old baby jars. I was born on June 3rd, 1980 in Portland Oregon two weeks after Mt. St. Helens erupted. My grandparents came to visit from California for my birth and the city and our house, cars, yard and everything was covered in thick ash everywhere. So, while they were there visiting, my grandpa took one of my one and half year old brother's used Gerber baby food jars and filled it with ash from the eruption. My mom told me to toss it since she didn't know anyone who would want it since there's tons of ash in little jars all over the place from that eruption so this one's wasn't that special. Well, once I got thinking about it I realized I was definitely not gonna throw away that jar of ash. It made me think about how I came into this world at the same time as Mt. St. Helens erupted. How the ash was from great devastation and destruction, but it was inside a baby food jar making me think of birth and new life. How this mountain had waited thousands of years to blow it's top just two short weeks before my birth so that I might enter a world covered in ash. And I thought about how I felt a special closeness to mountains and how my grandfather had too. He climbed to the peak of Mt. St. Helens before I was born and before it erupted. So I decided I should do that too.
After I found this jar I trained with the Mazamas Climbing Club and not only summitted Mt. Hood three times, but I went up to the crater rim of Mt. St. Helens, the highest spot still remaining. It was a life changing moment for me. I'm not a super earthy hippy type person, but somehow that jar made me feel connected to that mountain and my grandfather who had long passed away.