Thank you ever so much @beowulff for finding it for me. You have my everlasting gratitude. I owe you one. I tried to use the Discord search function but unsuccessfully. I was about to ask a real Doper who knew what they were doing to help. You graciously stepped up first.
That is one great story, Beck! You posted it just the month before I came around the Dope. You might have missed your calling-you sure have what it takes to be a gifted storyteller and I enjoy every word that falls from your pen.
Last summer we found a knife in our garden. A nice smooth kitchen knife I think. It was buried maybe an inch or two. I’m not sure what someone would have been doing with it in the garden, and if someone was trying to bury it (not that I have any ideas why that would be happening) they did a poor job.
There’s an idea among some religious Jews that if a utensil has become un-kosher through improper use (‘milk’ and ‘meat’ utensils are supposed to be kept separately), it can be made kosher again by burying it in the ground for a time.
Jewish religious authorities agree that this is a myth with no basis in Jewish law, but it seems to be a fairly widespread myth.
I grew up what you might call “lowly Orthodox” meaning we kept the meat and dairy dishes separate but ate the fish sandwich at McDonald’s.
My mother, Harriet, had her own special brand of Jewish. I called it “Reader’s Digest kosher.” For those old enough to remember Reader’s Digest, that is.
For instance, according to Kashrut, (the laws of kosher), if you accidentally use the meat fork in, say, a bowl of cottage cheese, you are supposed to bury it in the dirt for six weeks. (Or is it six months? I always forget.)
The first dozen or so times this happened in my house, when my sister, brother, or I made the boo boo, we were sent out back to bury the sullied silverware. The problem was, nobody thought to mark the grave. The grass would grow. My father, Marty, would mow the grass. The grass would grow again, and the offending flatware would simply be forgotten. I imagine in a few hundred years, interstellar anthropologists will dig up our back yard, scratch their heads, or um, horns, and say, "I wonder why man in the 1970s buried his eating utensils?
Oh, I almost forgot about this. I found a tombstone in the back yard. It was face-down and used as a step from the patio to the lawn. It was for a 10yo boy named Madison Hurd, who died in 1833. After some research, I found out that the family was on their way from the east to the west, when the boy died somewhere around here. It’s a neat stone, with his parents’ names, dates, etc.
We located three granite grave markers for dogs out by the barn, dating from the late '80s, with names, dates of birth and death. All of the dogs died when they were about six months to a year old.
These people were not good with dogs. Maybe they were in the habit of sending Bonzo out to play in traffic.
Not left by the owner, but possibly by one of the builders - a cheap machete. An electrician found it when he was removing drywall panels in the garage to route a new circuit. The handle was poorly-molded plastic that was also a bit loose. I turned it over to the police as I didn’t know how to safely dispose of it. They weren’t interested. I am positive that the previous owners of the home never knew it was there.
My parents bought a house rumored to have belonged to big-city mobsters. The story was they’d fled to the boonies to “retire” and bought the entire property with a suitcase full of cash. When my parents expanded the house years later, workers ran into serious trouble taking down the street-facing walls. They were layers of reinforced concrete, interleaved with steel sheeting. An older contractor saw this and told them he’d only seen this construction material once, in the backstop of an indoor rifle range.
The walls facing the street were not just bullet-proof, but large caliber rifle-proof. There may have been some substance to the old rumors.
One of my relatives had bought a “fixer upper” & my cousin & I were tasked with demoing the sheet rock.
They also wanted us to remove the electrics and plumbing. Being a broke teenager, I decided to haul all of the metal, especially the copper, to the scrap yard for cash.
My cousin did not want to waste time separating it though. Thus, after he left & the clock stopped, I separated it out. In two electrical junction boxes in the basement I found 100 dollar bills.
I asked the owners about them & they said keep them, a bonus if you will. My cousin did not want anything to do with the “stashed blood money” so I got a very good bonus for scrapping.
It pays to recycle!
We never did find out who, or why they placed the bills in the junction boxes.
I had two empty electrical boxes in the master bedroom when I moved in. I eventually concluded the previous owner had put speakers up there (at least 10 feet above the floor). The speakers were long gone. We put plates over the holes until we eventually fixed the drywall.
