Buried Treasure

This is the season for optimist gardening. One flavor of optimism is planting half-price perennials. Will they come back in the spring? Maybe? If not, they were half-price. The flavor of optimism I like even better is planting bulbs. The darkest seasons end, they say to me, and there will be daffodils afterward.

I might be planting a lot of daffodils in this particular October, friends.

Today I made a pot of chili (with these lovely raisin-y dried anchos, one of the first of many pandemic chili pepper purchases) and left it to simmer while Pete and I put in our discount perennials. A friend stopped by to borrow a sleeping bag and we had a pleasant sidewalk chat. Pete came up to us in the middle of it. "Look what I found!" he exclaimed. 

Way down in the dirt, down at the bottom of the hole he'd been digging for one of our new plants, he'd found a ring of ancient keys. Two looked like old-fashioned car keys; the third, a little smaller, was broken in half.

"Oh my goodness," I said, "I wonder how long someone spent looking for those!" Pete wasn't convinced they'd been dropped. They were buried too deeply, he thought. 

"Maybe they're keys to a stolen treasure," I mused, "and the person who buried them died of guilt before he could retrieve them."

Or maybe, I thought later, they were keys with sentimental value. Maybe the car was totaled in a crash, but it didn't seem to right to the owners just to throw the keys away.

Or, you know, maybe someone just dropped them in the yard. But that's kind of a boring explanation.

Hey, want to play a game? Leave your wacky explanation for the presence of deeply-buried 50-year-old keys in the comments. Maybe there will be prizes!

Comments

[SalomeEllen]

A previous owner buried them for grandchildren to discover. The grandchildren immediately lost interest in digging for treasure...

[Kellie]

"Little Benny can play right here in the dirt while I plant these half-price perennials," thought Mr. Past Owner, crouching down nearby and not feeling his two-year-old reach into his back pocket.

(I don't know if that explains the broken one, though. Maybe there was a curious family dog with strong jaws also helping to watch Little Two-Year-Old Benny? Never having owned a dog, I can't estimate those odds very well.)

[Nicole]

I just finished teaching Jekyll and Hyde, so broken keys make me think...maybe the keys' owner was regularly escaping home (albeit in a "mask") to party in dangerous ways, and decided this was a bad idea, so he not only broke the key, but buried it in the backyard, so there was no chance of taking that car anywhere!