object story

A Link in Time

As I dug, my small hand shovel hit something hard.  I thought it was just a rock, as it is very rocky out here. I decided to just dig around it, but I kept hitting whatever it was.  I finally decided to try to uncover it and see what it was so I could try to move it. As I brushed away the dirt on top, what I thought was a rock was actually, much to my surprise, a wooden box.  As I tried to uncover it more and retrieve this newly found treasure I thought about how it got here and why it was here.  Why was it a few feet from the big tall tree that I loved to escape to? Why was it out here a few acres from the farm house we moved into a few years ago? What could be inside? Did the person who buried it want it to be found?

As I tried to unbury and gather up the box I thought about the history of this area. I thought about how soldiers, young men from small families, lived in this area. One had even lived in my house back then. I wondered if he was the one who buried the box.

I finally got a hold of the box. I flipped the lid open to see what was inside. There was an old lock, heavy and a little dirty. There was also two interlocking chain links. One of the last two things was a small, pressed, white flower. And lastly a note written in almost perfect cursive. Written to a young man from the girl he loved.

The note talked about how she told him to look for this box, buried a few feet from the tree they would always meet at, when he got home from the war. It also talked about how the small, pressed flower represented the small, white flowers he would always give her when they met by the tree. The lock, that she had randomly found, represented that he had the key to her heart. And at last the two chain links represented that they would always be connected especially in heart.

I thought about what I had just seen and read. I thought about it seemed like he never came back, never looked for the box. This was the part of me that knew the reality that not very man made it back. But the romantic side of me thought that he did make it back and was fine and was so in love with her and happy to be back that he went straight to her forgetting about the box.  I decided to go with the latter idea. I also decided to rebury the box. Knowing that by now they would both have been dead for many years.  I reburied it so just in case their spirits wanted to visit it they could.