Beneath the Water

  Damon and I stopped in town and went into the park, when he noticed that the river that empties into the harbor was dry, which meant the dam was closed. We hopped down into the the dry riverbed that comes out from beneath all the old businesses on main street. I swung the detector for a few minutes, but the quantity of metal jammed the machine pretty badly. It actually exploded in my hands! Then I noticed the pennies lying in the mud and I turned off the machine and just started picking them up. Very quickly I realized there were some wheat pennies mixed in and I looked a little closer. I managed to find one Indian head, which is roughly dated 190(something), 6 wheatbacks, two clay pipe stems, an old spoon, a marble(love finding marbles), a beautiful little perfume bottle stopper, a great large square nail, and some swiveling brass doohicky. Also, a total of 3.25 in dirty money. My fiance is going to strangle me if I don't find some place to store all of this great garbage. Hopefully, she realizes how very much I love her.

The Garden Next Door

  Last week I got permission to hunt my neighbor's rather large garden, which sits in the center of an enormous lawn; and this lawn was once part of the nineteenth-century farm that included both the neighbor's house and my own. Well, the ground finally thawed enough to get a spade in sometime late Sunday afternoon and I spent an hour or so pacing back and forth across last year's furrows while my fiance worked on a paper for school.
  I found mostly the usual unrecognizable rusty pieces of old farm junk and lead bullets (which makes me think it is a good idea to metal detect all gardens to avoid food contamination). However, I was happy to find a small copper buckle, probably from a shoe or boot and another spoon to add to my found spoon collection. I don't know what it is, but I find these spoons everywhere I go. I suspect that nineteenth-century Mainers just carried spoons around with them in their pockets, in case they came across some soup or something in the woods. Anyway, I love the damn spoons. I am fascinated by the shapes they adopt while buried inside the earth.

  Currently, my spoon collection is being used in a large plant pot in our living room, stuck into the potting soil upright to prevent our crazy cat, Howard, from using it as a litter box.