Treasures Under Foot

I’ve done a lot of digging around my property. Sure I could have hired excavators and I have in the past, but every time I have done so they end up destroying something. One collapsed the top of my septic tank, another drove over some fruit trees. One even went off course to bury some utilities and dug a trench through an approved septic field rendering that field unusable.

Since then I only employed excavators on land away from the house. I’ve dug a foundation for a house addition by hand. I dug to level the land for a green house by hand. I dig all my fence post holes by hand. I dig my own drainage trenches and trenches for underground irrigation. Oddly where ever I dig I find things that were left behind years ago. Some times is garbage and broken bottles, but often it is an old toy and especially marbles.

I remember back as a child I would burry marbles. It was like burying a treasure, and to kids of my generation they were as good as currency. I figured that if I could remembered where I buried them, I’d always have access to my treasure if I needed it. It was akin to people of my grandfathers’ generation buried their money or kept it in their mattresses because they didn’t trust the Federal Reserve. I knew I couldn’t deposit my marbles in a bank, and that they would be safe in the ground. I’m sure someone has long ago dug the marbles I left in the back yard on Island Road.

I have a pint sized jar of marbles that I’ve found over the last nineteen years on the property where I now live. Sometimes I look at them and wonder if an adult who once lived here as a child will ever come to seek them out. If they do I will happily hand them over.