Attempt not to Vomit

I grew up in a house ringed by woods, tall old trees that are, even now, stretching twisted branches closer to the house with each passing summer, leaves eclipsing evening sun earlier each year than the last. The border between the woods and the houses is marked by a broad ditch (which we call “the dike”) and at its bottom lies a moat of brackish slime. The trees have jumped the gap though, so the woods seem to spill over the dike and into the ends of the gardens.

As children, we would climb the trees and, from time to time, dig with tablespoons in the soft, black earth beneath the trees. The soil was rich and loose, and in it we would find marbles. Of course, we had the same marbles that any other children had, clear glass affairs with twists of coloured plastics at their cores, but we also had those marbles we’d dug from the earth.

In my most distant memories I feel that they were a common thing. We would find them as a matter of routine, and lose them as easily, but as they became rarer we treasured them. We would dig in the summertime, hoping to unearth them. In those days before the internet, it never occurred to us that they were anything special, that other children hadn’t them.

They were identical to other marbles in size, but made of a frosted glass. They were fogged and I imagined them to be like pearls, though I had only seen pearls in cartoons. We knew them as “foggies.” In the summertime, we would lick our thumbs and rub their slightly roughened surfaces and all at once they would turn a just-off-transparent yellow through which the sun would shine to cast a shadow with a bright point of light at its centre.

As the years wore by, we would find them half-formed, one edge flattened as though whatever strange subterranean system had formed them had been abruptly arrested.

There was no strangeness to simply unearthing these things for us; it was just the way things were. Marbles came from underground.

A long time ago, I went looking for an image of one of those marbles, and this was all I found; a treasure trove I could never have hoped to equal in all my years of mining.

Last year, however, I discovered that these marbles were a leftover part of the process of lithographic printing. They’re used, along with grit, to leech ink from the lithographic plates. From time to time, I’m told, one might get stuck, in which case the constant movement of grit and plate beneath it results in one side of the glass bearing being worn down, a third or so of the bead will be abraded, rubbed smooth by the moving grit.

Mystery solved, I suppose. I haven’t had the heart to explain it to the others.