ANDRE BEGIN

Sometimes it feels like we live in a one and a half acre lost and found department.

It never ceases to amaze me what we discover on our property when we do some yard work or even just during a casual stroll after a heavy downpour.

So far, we haven’t uncovered anything worthy of a spot on an episode of Antiques Roadshow, nor anything that earn us enough to pack up and move to Beverly Hills.

Nonetheless these little surprises have been like the Easter egg hunt we never expected and an interesting part of country living, often getting my imagination flowing into the story behind these objects.

Back when I lived in the city in a fairly new development, there really wasn’t any opportunity to dig up curiosities from yesteryear.

The rare item to surface might be the occasional toy forgotten by one of the neighborhood kids or a plastic yogurt container that drifted over from the neighbour’s recycling bin on a windy garbage day.

But rarely did I see anything of any notable vintage.

In the country, it’s a different story.

Shortly after we moved in, after a significant rain storm, this horseshoe surfaced in an area where there was just exposed soil.

How old it might be is anyone’s guess given the amount of rust on it. However, to me, I just took this as a sign of good luck on our journey in the country.

After we had our garage built, these little green army men started peeking through the soil after the summer rains.

In chatting with one of our neighbours, we discovered that they belonged to one of the boys who grew up here in the 1980s.

More recently, I started noticing dishware peeking through the ground behind our garage. Before getting our hopes up that it might be pottery from ancient civilizations, I noticed some lettering that quickly suggested a commercial brand that is still in production.

In a darker turn, one of the oddest discoveries that Ivy the Wonder Cat made on one of her leash walks was this skull that appeared on our driveway one morning.

At Ivy‘s last appointment, I showed a picture of it to our vet who said her best guess would be that it belonged to a raccoon. Again, nothing terribly revealing in the history of our county.

How it got there? Why it got there? In the presence of as many species of wildlife as we have, it truly is anyone’s guess.

The strangest part is that as mysteriously as the skull appeared one morning, it stayed for a couple of weeks and then just mysteriously disappeared.

On the subject of bones, another weird discovery was what appeared to me like chicken bones at the base of one of our hollow maple trees.

I don’t think we’ll ever know to what species they belonged, especially since there really isn’t any fowl nearby, but the fact that this was the tree known to house a family of raccoons, it wouldn’t be surprising that these were the discards from whatever animal protein they happened to find in someone’s garbage can.

Also, one morning, when taking out the garbage, I noticed a piece of black synthetic fabric on our lawn.

At first, I thought it might have been landscaping fabric, but it was much softer than that. It definitely had human hands on it at some point, because there was a knot tied at one end of the swatch.

Given the distance to our closest neighbours, it’s unlikely that it just blew over.

Did an animal pick it up to potentially use as bedding for winter hibernation? Was it something a feral cat dragged in? Who knows?

Even though none of the artifacts I have found have been earth shattering by any stretch of the imagination, it never ceases to amaze me how they can be a glimpse into the lives of the people who lived here previously and of the lives they led…

Or not!

As a writer, I can’t help but to be fascinated, wondering how the artifacts got there, who left them behind and what the object meant to them.

Just the same, could these be the inspiration and the foundation for future stories?

Time will tell! 😉

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Sincere thanks for reading!
Have a great day,
André