What’s better than finding a piece of cobalt blue sea glass on the beach? Your five-year old finding a piece of cobalt blue sea glass on the beach.

The shrieks of delight and enthusiasm from my daughter still echo in that happy place in my brain where good memories are filed away for keeps.

She found it a couple of weeks ago under a driftwood log.

“Look what I found mom!!!” she announced, holding up the piece as if it were the Devil’s Eye Diamond from The Rescuers.

Maddie knows that big chunks of cobalt blue sea glass are hard to come by – especially ones with words on them.

Today I did some research on the piece. I simply plunked in “A. J + cobalt blue bottle” into Google, and presto-mundo (the internet really is magic!) – there it was: a Laxol bottle.

Yes, it’s a laxative. And likely more than 100 years old. My daughter will get a serious kick of these two facts.

The bottle was from A. J. White (Andrew Judson White), New York. A. J. was  a proprietary medicine maker in New York City who teamed up with the Shakers in New York to produce medicines using botanical ingredients supplied by the Shakers. In 1957, A. J. White was purchased by Smith, Kline and French Laboratories.

You know you’ve got it bad when a laxative bottle (or piece of it) turns your crank.