As part of the “Jay’s Secret Laboratory”/Shed build, I’ve been spending the past few weekends digging a big hole in the back yard (and creating an almost Egyptian dirt pile). This project started with Lois and Rick also digging but I’ve been solo for the past two weekends. Anyway, a few things have come to light, literally and figuratively.
It turns out that a backyard as leisure space is a more recent phenomenon, whereas historically it used to be more of a utility space. Besides clotheslines and gardens, a common activity was trash burning. (This makes me wonder if urbanization and laws against burning resulted in the shift to leisure space? Well, that and supermarkets vs. gardens I suppose…)
Anyway, as any Jr. Archaeologist will tell you, trash piles are a treasure trove of information about previous cultures and people. [Keep that in mind as we create landfills that beggar the imagination.] Anyway I can now state the following about the previous inhabitants: they had a burn barrel, 55-Gallon steel drum, and threw lots of trash in it (I found the rusted remains of the barrel’s bottom, literally scraping it with the shovel. We’ve also pulled a lot of steak bones, rusty metal, broken glass, broken plates, and best of all some intact old bottles from the back yard. Yesterday alone I pulled out 4 good ones. My favorite so far was a smallish triangular blue glass bottle from the “Owl Drug Company” labeled “POISON” right on the glass. I got that one last weekend. This weekend I got a very small bottle which took the cute award, and a still-full bottle of what appears to be lotion of some sort. This looks more recent than most of the stuff out there, but I’m still a little leery of opening it.
So where’s the profit? Well, mostly that had we hired this work out, it’d be about $1000. So we saved a grand and got some cool bottles.
Yay. I’d put an exclamation point there, but I’m not sure my back is up to lifting it…
