At first it was the discovery of a few broken tiles: a marginally curious harvest that could be dismissed as an anomaly. But then came the broken bottles. The incongruous, rusting and long-past useful metals roads. Some lodged within building materials, others just twisted and rusting on their own. And then one night the rains came down and the next morning shards of glass surfaced in the morning sun. All of these discoveries, a by-product of five days contract work that was supposed to be Open and Close. Instead, thus commenced the digging.

Six months ago, a crew came to lay long lengths of pipeline in the throughout the green area surrounding the house. It was a necessary upgrade of a sewage system that hadn’t been touched since ground was first broken some four decades ago. And they did their work, even if the souvenir left behind wasn’t that pretty. Closing up the scarred ground should have been left to landscapers. Perhaps rolling some new turf over the entire thing and calling it a day. But things didn’t go that way because, after all, none of us have infinite reserves of cash to spend on the beautification of our homes.

The trap effectively was the same that we all fall into: what starts as you chipping at the peeling paint of one shingle become a pulling off of the shingle because it is loose. Behind the shingle, you see some rot. Before you know it, you have taken all of the siding off the side of the house and you are now looking into the seals of the windows. The task has mushroomed. Perhaps it was better to have left the chipping paint to its own devices.  

What was incredible about all of this churned up earth is that in the months that followed, it continued to resemble a neglected shoreline. The kind where the tide continues to give up the discards floating in the sea. All of the crap that we, a self-centered human population who continue to pollute with minimal short-term impunity. Except that this wasn’t a long and sweeping coastline serving as Mother Nature’s lint trap; instead, it was a tiny postage stamp of space that contained a single person’s personal property. Really the last place that a homeowner would choose as a disposal site for discards that should have been placed at the kerb.

Clearly, when all this stuff was deposited, nobody ever imagined that it would be dug up ever again. Or if they did, they knew it would happen long after their own expiration date. As the digging continues, it leaves you wonder why they did this. The possibilities, in my mind, are three:

-They wanted to make a short-term problem go away quickly

-They were comically myopic 

-They just didn’t give a shit

The period when all of this must have happened was in the early seventies. It is not my story to tell, and as a second-hand observer I can only speculate and as an outsider. But I do know that Ihave lived a similar experience. And if you’re reading this right now, I know that you have too. Everyone who’s got any amount of living and transition under their belt has things that they’ve either buried away or unearthed. And when you’re in the present moment, you are never giving much thought to what will happen later on.

Whenever I go home, I’m in this constant battle that’s got me bumping up against portals of time that occurred long before my existence. I discover bit of memorabilia that are a complete mystery and in complete need of interpretation. The solution when I come upon such an object is to consult the family oracle, my father.

“Hey Dad,” I walk into whatever room he is in, “What’s this?” 

I hand my father an object—most recently it was a bumpy mound of silver that was holding court somewhere in the house. Maybe on a shelf. More likely in a drawer.

As I anticipate he will do, he takes the weighted piece from me. He brings it closer to his face, and perhaps rotates it as if this will provide a more complete understanding of my inquiry. 

“Oh.” He says, I can see the invisible switch going on inside his head almost immediately. “This was a spoon that I found while working on the Kennedy Compound. We were converting a two-car garage which was once the summer headquarters of the Secret Service for JFK. We were converting into an apartment for Kathleen and the kids.”  He tells me this as though we are next door neighbors with the Kennedys in Hyannis. I myself would need to Google exactly which “Kathleen and the girls” he is talking about.

“This…” I ask him, taking from him what to me looks like a silver Pet Rock, “was a spoon?”

“Yuh,” he says looking down at it. “One day I decided to melt it down.” And with that he turns back to whatever new project he was working on.

So that was that. Another key unlocked—however inconsequential to my own life. Thinking about all of the crap that was now being dug up in someone else’s yard some thousands of miles away, I felt fortunate that I still had the only cipher in the world as a consultant on my personal orbit of family crap. Because it was someone else’s father who had clearly buried all of this stuff in the backyard. And that father was no longer around to answer for all of the things that his son was now uncovering. 

Even when we do receive a back story or explanation, the irony is that these data points can only usually remain in our current day brains for a limited amount of time. This is because they are sentimental memories that may or may not help to elucidate the past actions of our predecessors, and most likely they have little bearing on where we ourselves are going. One that keeps life unique and interesting.

It’s a bit of a fool’s errand, I know, trying to record each bit of jagged discovery that we find along our own life’s route. But at the same time, I still find that I want to catalog as much as I possibly can. I do this as all of the current day crap continues to come at me, and then I find myself wading between what is important in the modern day, and what might have been important decades ago. You can see why so many objects wind up collected and placed in a refuse bag at the end of the driveway. Or perhaps they get buried in the ground for a future person to deal with. Whatever is easiest to deal with at the time. We humans have only so many hours in the day.

As for the front yard full of broken debris, I look at this all as an outsider with no skin in the game. The ciphers are no longer around, and so I’d kill for a time machine to go back almost 50 years and watch as the decision was made to throw discarded bottles, olive bags and plastic bags into the earth just by the porch. But this is not a possibility, and so most (if not all) of the beachcombed pieces are bound for the recycle bin.

What’s interesting about all of these rediscovered finds is that sometimes they become the only remnants of what once represented a certain period of time. And for this reason, even trash becomes interesting for a time that is gone forever. Six months on, as the yard continues to give up broken pieces from the past, I think it bears noting that for all of the planning that goes into our existence in the name of posterity, most of what remains is our garbage. 

The yard excavation continues, even a half year on. I am sure that more stuff will continue to be churned up—and it is most likely that none of it will parallel the silver glob story that brought me to the summer house of the Secret Service. But still, it’s a family story in itself. Full of mystery and holes that will never be filled. If anything it serves as a reminder to us in the present day, that what we burrow away for later, will likely surface at some later date. If we’ve got the bandwidth, maybe we can lay something interesting, complete with a bit of an explanation. For now though, most of what’s in the backyard is just an exercise of “throw it in the garden…they’ll take the recycling out in 50 years.”