Ink well

I was recently traveling and stayed in a 13th century stone house. The room I stayed in as I arrived had windows cracked open but latched, to prevent the wind from blowing them open. Despite the October date, the sun’s warmth still lingered on just a bit in the turn to dusk, and the fresh breeze from the garden was welcome. And yet I was surprised to find very cold, sleepy wasps kept entering the room. I’d find them almost sleepwalking around on a cushion or sill, and was able to collect them up with a card and escort them back out the windows, their bodies too slow in the increasing cool to hold on to any need to sting. I ushered each of them out without incident.

Later in the week, I bought a small bottle of iron gall ink—made in the way ink had been made for centuries, from Roman times if not earlier up until the nineteenth century when new materials and technologies made it less common.

I thought about those cooled, drowsy wasps after I bought the ink. Of how ink had for so long be…