After more than a year of playing Indiana Jones in the towering bushes that made up our front garden, Geddy and I decided a simpler look was in order. Down came the bushes, up came the roots and so began the quest for reclaiming our yard.
In the woods, Geddy discovered part of an old wall made of beautiful hand-hewn stones. He began carefully digging them out, washing them and placing them just so for a walkway separating the flower beds. On about his third trip into the woods, he burst into the house hollering that he had found bones and no way, no way was he going back in there by himself call my brother Bubby who knows about old stuff...please!
Bubby, who has a keen interest in history and some amateur experience in archaeology, was dispatched and wandered over. Meanwhile, I went online and asked the most smartest persons I know, my girlfriends at Frugal Families and The Well-Trained Mind, who it is that you call when you dig up dead people in your back yard. (The correct answer to that, BTW, is local law enforcement first, coroner second and museum curators third. Curators do not like that order.)
I don't get out much, so this was pure excitement. Was it a Native American burial mound? A family plot? Civil War soldiers? Murder victims?
Turns out, all that was dead was a grotesquely twisted brier.
So we didn't get our 15 minutes of fame, but we also didn't get our yard torn up, eminent-domained or trampled by looky-sees. And our walkway looks very nice.
