Wednesday, June 23, 2010

A time capsule of sorts.

dad's sprinkler

Not too long ago, we had a family activity at my parents house.

I consisted of my family, my three brothers and their families, and my parents, tearing out two rather large bushes from the front lawn of my parents house.

I really wasn’t good for much of the hard labor, I was good for carrying loads of branches to the dumpster parked on the street.  Lynn was quite good at it too.

But while we were there to be man (or woman) power to help get the monsters out, we were also there to be together as a family, because we do have fun together, and to also see what we could find in the bushes.

Between those two bushes, we had lost many things throughout our growing-up years.  We were excited to be reunited with all of our “lost” belongings.

Many balls, different kinds and colors were discovered, a bat, garbage of all sorts, even an old “Otter Pop” tube.  It claimed to be “super size”, but was sadly, smaller in size than the ones my kids enjoy today.  But it must have  been super-size to us!

As my two older brothers rolled the last remains of one bush down the driveway to the dumpster, a clump of paper fell out.  I went to retrieve it, and found a note.  It was in bad shape, it had been there for maybe 15 years, so yeah, bad shape indeed.  It was girls handwriting, already slightly torn.  It would have been fun to have been able to read it, see what secret someone shoved into the bush.  It can keep secrets.

We didn’t find our missing G.I. Joes, or the countless matchbox cars we were expecting to come across, but we still had a good time.

The best story to come out of the bush was my dad’s first sprinkler.

He bought it when they bought the house, 35 years ago.  He used it only a couple of times and then it went missing.  He assumed that someone stole it.  (It was a nice little sprinkler.)  He kinda forgot about it, went on with his life as a new homeowner.  Probably found himself a new sprinkler.

So he wasn’t expecting to be reunited with his sprinkler 35 years later as we cut down those bushes, but he was.

He cleaned it up, gave it a new home in the garage, and we all wondered just how it got into that bush.

I just took pictures of it….

Quite the story from those time capsule bushes.

5 comments:

Ally's Corner said...

Maybe you wrote something on the paper and forgot it in the bushes also. Sprinkler in the bushes??? Now that is really funny!!

BookwormMom said...

Cole's g-ma still occasionally finds green army men in her garden...

Bon said...

What a fun nostalgic post!

Bon said...

Oh BTW I stopped blocking the whole world from my blog after my good friend and then my sister-in-law asked me why they couldn't get in any more. It seems like from posts I read in the past that you have had your own disappointments in the blogger world. Would love to chat about how you motivate yourself to keep blogging when everything doesn't go perfect in the bloggosphere. LUv your cousin

Crystal said...

What a great find :-) The bad thing about finding it 35 years later is now your parents have probably put in automatic sprinklers.