Buried treasure

The house we live in was built in 1928. During the first spring I lived here, I made a wonderful discovery. After a strong rain, little bits and pieces of glassware and dishes would be washed up to the surface of the yard.

At first this baffled me. I wondered if someone had an argument and threw all their wife's dishes out the window to be spiteful. Or if someone had been collecting different colored bottles, and one day tired of them and hedonistically shattered them in the yard. But I didn't just find the pieces in one particular place, it was all over the yard, mostly towards the back of the house. This was quite a mystery to me for a couple of years, until I read in a book that back before towns had organized trash pickups, people would bury their trash in the backyard.

I started keeping the more distinctively colorful pieces of glass, and the pieces that had been parts of a set of dishes. There's a recurring pink floral pattern that I find comes up pretty frequently. And just this week, I found what looks like a chuck of Fiestaware, in a beautiful aqua color.

Anita Shreve wrote a book called Sea Glass, named for a character who starts collecting bits of glass from the sand as she walked along the beach. (I haven't read it). But wouldn't it be great to take these little pieces of history and create some stories around them? Who did the floral dishes belong to? Did they move away, or just replace them with a prettier pattern? What was the world like for them at that time? Was a war going on? The stories would piece together, bit by bit, the lives of the people who lived here.

Maybe I should pick out something colorful, break it and bury it for the next residents. And they can wonder what I was like.