Discoveries

I spent a little over 4 hours today emptying out a room and moving the contents to the basement. The molding around the base of dressers and the desk hadn’t been dusted in several years, and when I was done the pile of dust in the middle of the floor was the size of a cat. So what did I turn up?

• Money (no surprise there) (about 64 cents)

• Expired coupons (How excited they made us when we first saw them…)

• Rusty paper clips (Why rusty? Nothing else was…)

• Sore throat lozenges (do they crawl out of the bag?)

• A cell phone charger that’s been missing for a year

• A pickle jar lid (My guess is that somebody was eating pickles out of the jar, and discarded the empty jar, forgetting about the lid.)

• Bandaids, in the wrappers

• Hair care utensils (I’m convinced that they deliberately hide. Two years ago I bought a dozen combs to try to make sure there’d be at least one available when the girls needed one. That helped a little…)

• A broken cup from Alaska

• A paper guide from a printer that’s been working just fine without it

• A decorative pull-chain handle that must have flown across the room when the chain broke and smashed the light globe

• The manual for a short-wave radio made in the 60’s (To be fair, the radio is also in the house)

• A title abstract for a property in Waukesha, with the last transaction dating to 1894. (The first entry is the sale from United States by the president, John Tyler)

Thing is, the condo is new and the room was empty 5 years ago. In a rather older house we once lived in I found an old iron in the basement: one of those you heated on the stove and quickly ironed with for a couple of minutes before it got cool again. “Old old ting;” maybe 90 years old at the time. Mostly what I found was old hardware, though. One apartment had a clip of about 5 8mm frames from what must have been an adult movie, buried in the shag carpet.

Some people find valuable antiques in the attic. I find old iron and title abstracts for somebody else’s land.