I don’t know how many times I’ve been out with my Gram, hunting a new berry patch or gathering grapevines for the wreaths and baskets she makes, and come across a straight row of daffodils, or irises arranged in two rows, meeting to form the right angle that may have been planted along a fence or bordering a garden. Gram always wants to stop and have a look around, to see if we can find other evidence of a house or garden spot, or the remains of a fence so she can reconstruct, in her mind, the life that may have been lived there. Everytime, she tells me about returning to the place where her gram’s house once stood, years after her death, and the only thing to show that a life was lived there, were the irises, that had once been kept in two rows but had multiplied and grew into thick patches, that bordered the walk. But she could see in her mind where the house, garden, well and fences had been in relationship to the irises.
That is amazing! I can imagine it is quite the experience. We see the flowers like this all over the place here. We often talk about getting a metal detector and seeing what we might find. Someone told me that you find the best things where the outhouse used to be...stuff falling out of pockets.
My husband, on a job site, recently had to do some excavation and uncovered an old outhouse spot. The hole was absolutely full of old stuff including about 150 old bottles. One that we were able to date was made around 1840.
The subcontractor running the backhoe said that he runs into outhouse holes fairly regularly and there’s almost always treasure in them.
Yes!