Altar Offering deals Bottle

This bottle came from the side of the road at my family's ranch in West Texas, from maybe up to a century ago when they didn't have anything else to do with their non-burnable trash. The bottle is a beautiful aqua color and it still has some of the vintage dirt inside it. Resting on top is the Virgem da Aparecida, the dark-skinned Brazilian Virgin Mary, a painted lead ornament deals that used to be on a magnet and lived on top of my refrigerator for 20 years after I brought it back from my Brazil adventure in 1996. The two hearts tied to the bottle's neck are aluminum and brass hand-made milagros (prayre offerings to pin to saints' alters) that I bought outside of churches in Mexico when I lived there in 1994 and 1995. The red thread that ties them on comes from my friend Cassandra's old sewing kit. And the pre-packaged set of religious, saintly items in the front on the bottom is something I inherited from Dad. He had a few of these in his stash of goodies, and he might have bought them as far back as 1979, when my parents took my 7-year-old brother and me on our first excursion to Mexico. We marched like the pale-faced gringos that we are through markets and villages, never once to the kind of "civilized" vacation spot my friends got to go to. And boy has that made all the difference. I'm very thankful for all of these adventures, and this bottle holds a little of all of them.