Things Found in the Dirt

My sister-in-law and I have been sending each other "things we found in the dirt" for over fifteen years now. This one's a little too big to send in the mail, so here's a picture:

Okay, okay, here's the story behind what you're seeing. I set out this morning with a couple of friends to dig the footings for the bottom level of the terracing project in my yard (you can see the hillside in last week's "arm workout" entry). Each of them were happily sinking their shovels into the clay and filling the wheelbarrow with dirt to be hauled off. I, in contrast, was getting nowhere. That's because I was hitting concrete. THIS concrete. As in concrete porch stairs. Complete. Thrown down the hill and buried lo these many years ago. My theory is that they're the original porch steps from before the breakfast room and deck were built onto my house. It floors me that someone would just toss a large piece of construction waste down the hill and bury it. Here's the scene as I imagine it:

Burris and Cletis have just detached the porch from the kitchen doorway. The porch is quite heavy. Burris pauses, wipes the sweat off his brow, and says, "Hey, that there porch needs hauled to the dump."

Cletis: "Yep. Kinda heavy, though."

Burris: "It's a long way to the truck, and we have to haul it all the way around the whole house. Reckon we can carry it that far?"

Cletis: "Mebbe."

It starts raining.

Cletis: "Look how it's pourin' down the rain! Now what do we do?"

Burris: "Let's just give the porch a big shove and see where it slides to. We still got lots of diggin' to do. We'll just cover it up later."

Let me also note that this was the point in the project where we wondered what else we might find as we dug: a vent into a coal mine, perhaps? A decaying sofa? The skeleton of a beloved pet? (My home teacher called dibs if we found a sofa.) Dinosaur bones?

Anyhow, we finally got the stairs shifted and broken enough to continue the trench and build the wall. (Sledgehammers are awesome when wielded by someone who knows how to use them. When they're wielded by me, they're not so awesome. Good thing I wasn't wielding it today.) This is row one, being carefully measured to be sure it's level and doesn't shift.

And here's the finished wall! Yay, pretty! Well, except for the sides we can't figure out how to do yet. Two more terrace walls to go. Next step, fill in that monster hole where the stairs were dug out.