Joe Was Here.

I’m better.

Still sad and tender. I miss my nutty girl but am resigned to her loss and feel like we did what we had to do. My neighbors are healing and we have had some lovely talks. We can walk dogs with them now. Gittel and Jakson just trot on down the road side by side. Unconcerned. Normal.

I think about her mostly at night, when Al’s on the road. I crawl into bed and let myself fall into feeling. I let my hand recall her big, bony head under my hand, and the way she trusted us – yeah, that’s when I cry.

For a few weeks after Chloe died, I didn’t want to metal detect or anything. But when Cheryl got permission to explore a 50-acre tract of land just south of town in a decidedly historic area, I pulled myself together. We spent several weekends there.

Without getting too specific, I’ll say that for well over 100 years, this place has been a home to children who have no parents. I was very aware of this every time we drove into the beautiful, casually landscaped property. We knew there had been an old home or two on the property – now long gone. There’s a tiny cemetery where a man and his wife rest under a tree.

The digging was fun. Nothing truly amazing, but a LOT of stuff.

Here’s one day’s haul, all spread out and minus the obvious trash.

Themes emerged. I’ve never found a lock before but found three in short order.

Also, pocket watches abounded, as did old spigots, tops to salt shakers and cheap jewelry.

And toys. The toys made me think a lot about the hundreds of children who lived there.

On a rise, close to the road, I found this old log splitter.

Jakson wanted to display it for you, so I let him.

I found several things with stuff written on them, like these 1940s-era earphone parts.

What were these things doing there?

But some things were written by hand.

I can't read it. But someone wrote it.

This is part of an old cigarette lighter. I guess
"Irene" wanted everyone to know it was hers.
When I found this, and saw the name, I was
suddenly aware that children with no parents
might really need to claim things, to write their
names on things. I mean, everyone likes to
do that, but it might be extra important to a
an adolescent girl named Irene who's pretty
much alone in the world and who smokes
secretly behind the cafeteria, waiting for the
day she turns 18.

I remember that the second day we were to dig there, I had woken up thinking about my grandfather, Joe Whitley. I often think of him when I go metal detecting because he would have loved it so much and I know that the weird gene that makes me want to dig in the dirt comes from him. 

Joe Whitley (his grandkids called him Jody) loved finding things. He loved sneaking up on you and surprising you with a pecan in his hand, or a flower. He was not an eloquent man – a high fever had left him with a mild aphasia – but he was smart and funny and he knew how to love people. 

Anyway, I’d been thinking about the blessing he always said before every meal: “Forgive us of our sins, O Lord… accept our thanks, for Christ’s sake, Amen.” And I’d started to work on a song called Jody’s Grace.

Here's Joe Whitley with a couple of great-grands.

That day, after about five hours of frenzied digging, Cheryl and I were heading back to the cars and I was idly swinging my machine as I walked, when I got a signal and hurriedly dug it. It was an old ID bracelet! We looked at it up close, but, alas, there was no name on it. Still, cool find.

I got it home and put it on the table and kind of forgot about it. But much later, I decided to look at it under my most powerful magnifier.

There was a name after all.

Joe.

Chloe

(Note: I said some of these posts might be about dogs. This one is. Not a lot of MD, but I'll make an effort to tie it in.)

These days, my brain doesn’t gently rise into wakefulness, it grinds.

I roll over into Day # I-no-longer-know and my brain turns over like an old car starting on a sub-zero morning, metal on metal, replaying the horrible events of the past few days, revisiting alternate scenarios, getting good ideas that might have made a difference, remembering good ideas I had but never acted upon…

The good things I did? They are waiting somewhere in back closet, covered up by old coats.

The house is so quiet. Al’s back on the road and I’m so glad he’s not here to experience my breath – the breath born of a diet of Ativan, Valium and few actual calories, but for those in Mad Housewife white zin.

Yes, the house is quiet. We’re down to one dog. Chloe is gone. I knew she was nervous and noisy – panting and pacing, shaking the house when she ran with Jakson to the window to register her displeasure with the UPS man. But damn, what a vacuum in her absence.

Empty things.

I’ll get right to it: last Friday, Chloe attacked a neighbor and his dog. They were injured but will heal in time. As soon as we could, we had a vet come to the house and put her down. She died with rabbit stew in her mouth, and her family’s hands touching her. She loved and was deeply loved. She was dangerous. How strange that those can go together.

When Dinah, our beloved Rott-mutt, died in August of 2009, Al and I obsessively trolled Rott rescues and Petfinder. We found Chloe in the Clarksville TN animal shelter. She was magnificent. A huge, healthy, pure-bred Rottie girl who, when we put our fingers through the cage, wagged her nub to a blur and licked our hands. She had been dumped at the shelter in the middle of the night with a note saying her name was Chloe and she was a year old. She was spayed. We put her in the play yard with another beautiful, but very sad Rottie girl. Chloe tried and tried to get her to play, but the sad Rottie just sat at the gate looking for her owners. So many times, I’ve wondered how it all would have played out if we’d taken the sad, loyal girl.  But we took the happy, goofy one.

There was a feeling of falling backwards off a cliff – of believing that it all would work out. Like when Al and I decided to get married. Like when we got Dinah. Like the first moments of all the most beautiful things in my life.

Then next day, which was Halloween, I had to teach and Al got the van and drove back out there, trying to beat a Rottie rescue group who was also on their way.

Chloe hopped right in the van. Al called me from the road. Guess who I have sitting right here beside me, he asked.

(Last night, I dreamed about a tiny, Rottie puppy, just so new, but with big, all-seeing eyes. I held it in my arms. In the dream, Al had brought this puppy home with him, but it wasn’t for me, it was for “Carl” (as in “Good Dog, Carl”?) but all that was incidental. What was powerful was looking deeply into this puppy’s eyes. I hope this means that Chloe has found her way back down to the planet. Or that she is now all-seeing. She was so beautiful.)

Not everyone finds the Rottie to be beautiful, but we do.

As soon as we got Chloe home, we fenced in our back yard, though the way our house was configured, we couldn’t just open a door and let out dogs. At the time, we were fostering an East Nashville street mutt named Jakson but didn’t plan to keep him. Chloe and Jakson got along great. Loud, but great. They ran and ran and ran. Big circles, crazy wrestling, then stillness, pounding play-bows, then off into the circles again. Jak yodeled like a soprano throughout. Buddies. We decided to keep the Jak-Man.

Holding hands.

Soon after the fence guys left, I watched as Chloe flattened her body to about 3 inches – think Rottweiler, post steamroller – and slithered underneath the chain link fence. And thus began a career of impulse and escapism that 1. Explained her surrender to the shelter and 2. Resulted in the terrible events that led in her death.

The fence guys came back and made it all slither-proof, but Chloe, though she sported a dumb-as-a-post affect, had a singular brilliance, a fine-tuned awareness of any opportunity to get loose.

When we got her, Chloe knew nothing. NOTHING. Besides being housebroken, she’d clearly had no training of any kind, except for how to lick people. The licking was … well, it was really something. The girl had a tongue. But in short order, I taught her sit, down, shake, catch food, basic recall – the foundations. She was waaay smarter than she looked and loved using her big fat brain.

Seriously. The tongue was like an alien being.

But she was nervous. She panted. She paced. It was as if she was plugged into a socket that gave her too much energy, or maybe the wrong kind of energy. She ran and ran in the back yard. We took her on long, long walks and, in those early days, to the dog park, where she mostly ignored the dogs and did NOT run, just sniffed and stood around aimlessly like Ferdinand the Bull. But given the slightest provocation – a loud noise, getting fed, someone at the door, a sudden movement – she panted, paced, spun.  Jakson taught her to bark and the two of them raised holy hell in harmony.

I enrolled her in obedience at Nashville Dog Training Club. As I recall, she did two levels of obedience and seemed totally happy and unconcerned around other dogs. She did one level of agility. It was during the second level – an absolutely huge class of dogs – that she began to fixate on a Weimaraner for reasons I could never understand. It made people nervous. We were banished to a corner of the room and eventually stopped going. No one likes the staring Rottie. I guess I can understand but I was hurt that the instructors did not reach out to me.

Then, in a move so “first-world” it makes me cringe, I enrolled her in a class for nervous dogs. I’ll say it here: if you want to make your nervous dog more nervous, put her in a small room full of nervous dogs and make her do “exercises.” What a crock.

She had her relaxed moments.

 On our daily walks, Chloe began lunging at passing dogs. I remembered that bratty behavior from Dinah’s teenage years and made it clear that it was not to be tolerated. She had some tantrums. We won.

A year or two in, I spotted a litter of puppies in a yard near our house. The mama dog was tied up on a short line. As the puppies grew older, they ventured closer and closer to the street. I called EastCAN, a local rescue, and worked with them to get the owners to relinquish the pups and we eventually placed them all.  A girlfriend from NYC took one. Another went to my neighbors, David and Cassie, across the street. I remember the day Cassie brought Gittel over to our house to meet my crew. Chloe got very excited and Gittel kept jumping up into Cassie’s arms. I could certainly understand. Ninety pounds vs. twenty pounds.

Cassie with Gittel. Note G's eyeliner, freshly applied.

I wish we’d kept up those visits. Instead, without talking about it, we just kept them apart. Over the years, Chloe became more and more agitated seeing Gittel in the street.

Trainers? We hired trainers and followed all kinds of advice. We sat at the entrance to Shelby Bottoms with a handful of hotdogs and let Chloe watch dogs as they walked past. We went with other dogs and owners on walks through parks and urban areas. We took her to Florida where she swam in the ocean at the dog park, we had people over and made her practice sitting while they came in. We had dinner parties where she lay in the middle of the floor and farted. 99% of the time, she was pretty good.

The issue was with dogs on OUR street. And containment, for whenever we let down our guard for a second – or we had a party, or I went out the basement doors to water the plants and forgot to close the basement stairs – she and her sidekick were GONE, flying down the street shouting so long suckahhhhs….

Two years ago, we went up north and left the dogs in the care of a substitute dog sitter. I could not have been more emphatic about the importance of containment, shutting the gate fully, etc. But in a moment of supreme f-up, the girl left the gate slightly ajar and Chloe jumped at the chance to run. Out in the street, she saw Cassie and Gittel coming out for a walk. She ran over, jumped up on Cassie’s shoulders, scaring her, then went after Gittel, growling and dominating her. Thankfully, there were no bites but both were terrified. She had upped the ante in a big way.

Seriously? Why would you do that. You idiot. (Yes,
sometimes I found myself wanting to have words with her.
At the same time, I knew it was up to us.)

We immediately rebuilt the back wall of our house to create a door that would go directly into the back yard. That helped.

Chloe also exhibited something called “redirected aggression” which is sort of like when you have a bad day at work and take it out on your husband but in Chloe’s world meant you get excited about some stimulus (other dog) then jump on Jakson and beat him up a little. Jakson was surprisingly forgiving about these brief but noisy exchanges, but it didn’t seem fair.

For me at least, this meant we needed to walk the dogs separately. With Al on the road many weeks of the year, that was double the walking for me. Our lives were now revolving more and more around Chloe’s increasing issues but we remained committed to helping her be the best dog she could be.

And yet so much was beyond our control. There are so many dogs that just run free in our neighborhood. One day, a loose Jack Russell Terrier ran up to us. Al had Jak. I had Chloe. It all happened so fast. The JRT ran up to me and Chloe. I opted to keep the leash loose and let them sniff, as that often worked in these situations. But Chloe picked up the dog and shook it. She dropped the dog, which ran off. We located the owners and the dog was ultimately ok, but it was alarming and instructive.

After a brief and expensive foray with yet another trainer, we hired Nikki, a behaviorist who specialized in anxious dogs and in understanding their language. She impressed us in the first five minutes. “Let her lick me,” she said, when we described Chloe’s obsessive licking. Chloe slobbered happily all over her arms and neck. Suddenly, Nikki let out a short, piercing “EEEK” and pulled her arms in toward her body. Chloe did the classic double take, took a few steps back and stared at her. She circled around and stared again. From that point on, her licking was dramatically reduced. We taught the technique to every new person who came in the house.

Nikki taught us that we had to let Chloe think for herself. She taught us fun “thinking” games to play with the dogs and I played with them for hours. It was fascinating. Did it improve Chloe’s self-esteem? More important: WAS THIS A CONFIDENCE ISSUE OR WERE POWERFUL GENETIC IMPULSES AT PLAY, RIPENING IN HER BRAIN AS SHE GREW INTO ADULTHOOD? I was never sure about that.

Broken thing.

Twice, Nikki brought other dogs with her and we were able to practice on our street. These were by far the most helpful and effective sessions we ever had with any trainer. I wish we could have done it every day but at $175/hour, that wasn’t possible. Chloe caught on quickly that her tantrums and rage toward the other dogs would get her nowhere and soon we were walking up and down the street – our street – past these strange dogs. It gave us great hope. David and Gittel volunteered to participate in the next session but Nikki cancelled. She had to cancel several more times after that and somehow life and travel and schedules and not being rich intruded and we didn’t work with her again, though we used her techniques.

As she’d recommended, we went several times to a spot near the dog park so Chloe could practice being around other dogs. It was hard work, for both of us. She did it, but she seemed so miserable.

Broken thing. (I think she was a little broken.)

Al stepped up. He loved walking Chloe on her new “shortie” – a 12-inch lead recommended by Nikki that gave him total control, even when she was being an ass for no reason. They developed a new bond.

So. Stage, set.

Last Friday, Al had Chloe tied up in the front yard while he mowed the yard. David and Gittel came down their driveway. Chloe went from relaxed grass-lounging to running at full-speed. The line snapped. There was a fierce melee, a scramble of men and dogs. David and Gittel, both bitten and bloody, were driven off to their respective hospitals and Al made one miserable call to me, up in Michigan where I was at an outdoor concert under a beautiful evening sky.

Al flew up to Michigan Saturday morning, leaving the dogs with our housemate, Pru. I played the most surreal gig of my career, hugging dozens of friends, pretending to be normal, happy and excited. Sunday morning, we drove back to Tennessee and were met at the door by the usual spinning, gleeful puppy antics.

Monday was spent trying to find a vet to come the house to put Chloe down, dealing with Animal Control (an utterly bizarre and confounding exchange) and reaching out to our neighbors. Monday night was very sad. Below, Al gets some face time.

Tuesday, we kept things as normal as possible. Our neighbor, Steve, came over to say goodbye. Chloe absolutely adored him and I love this video (below). For some reason, it gives me great comfort.

We played in the backyard.

At 4, a vet came by, a friendly woman named Jennifer. She gave Chloe a sedative and went outside for some final photos. The Big C began to get woozy and we led her back inside where she lay down on a blue blanket that has been very popular at our house.

I fed her some rabbit stew. She was happy about that and seemed completely unconcerned with the deft work the vet was doing. Jak watched and seemed equally unconcerned. Soon, she slipped away.

I'm sorry if this is morbid. Mostly, though,
I'm just sorry.

The vet left. A little while later, the cremation folks showed up. And that was that. That night, I made a little candle shrine for Chloe out next to our mailbox and sat in the street staring at it. Brought Jak out hoping he’d effect a reverential attitude, but no. 

Cassie and I hugged and spoke in the glow of the streetlight. It was both a good and painful conversation.

Sadly, Al had to leave early the next morning for a tour with Bettye. That has been a struggle. The grief – but mostly the thought that my dog had hurt someone – brought me to my knees.

A day or two after Chloe died, I ventured across the street to visit with David and Gittel and was so relieved to find them healing and in good and forgiving moods. I sat on the floor in their living room and hand-fed Gittel sliced turkey and sobbed on and off. David and I had the kind of open conversation that felt blessed. What everyone seems to agree on is that it could have been so much worse. For instance, it could have been a child.

I emailed a letter to the people I know on my street, acknowledging what happened, filling in the details. I got some nice responses. I posted about Chloe’s death on Facebook, but this will be the full account, for those who want to know it.

I suspect there are people who think I shouldn’t post or blog in a loving way about a dog that bit a neighbor. Or that because we fucked up – which we did, by not containing her properly – that we don’t deserve the luxury of public regret and explanation. I suspect that there were people who were afraid of her, and who thought we were irresponsible owners. I know there were plenty who loved her and knew how hard we worked with her, that she wasn’t a monster, that it wasn’t her fault.

Speaking of fault, I want to talk about blame.

Yes, I want to blame someone. Someone besides us. Just for a little while. Bear with me.

I want to blame the backyard breeder who brought her into the world. The selfish, uneducated idiot who put two good-looking Rottweilers together to make some money. In fact, I want to blame backyard breeders everywhere, and the people who buy dogs from them, perpetuating a cycle of overpopulation, neglect and disaster that dog rescuers just can’t keep up with. For when those cute puppies are sold – often weeks before the critical eight-week threshold – they are often brought home by equally selfish, uneducated idiots who stick them in the back yard and don’t train them. Then, they end up in shelters where hopeful, educated idiots like me take a chance that good care, discipline, training and consistency might overpower the giant roulette game that is their genetic destiny.

And it ends up like this.

It’s been several days since I started this too-long account and my brain is starting to calm down. Jakson seems somewhat stunned. He sleeps a lot. In July, we’ll be spending a week on Lake Michigan where he can clamber across the rocks and swim in the water. Chloe, I hope, will be nearby, a bird, a fish, a sudden shadow on the sand.

Failure, Cinema, Soldier Yoga Man

 Are you judging me? No?

Actually, I am fairly sure that some of my friends and family are judging me, or at least rolling their eyes just a wee bit. I've always been eccentric but this MD stuff, together with the current extreme length of my hair has got to be alarming. But I am of an age and mindset when so little of that matters to me any more. With the kids all mature and whatnot, I am free to do whatever I want, and so, within limits, I do. If I want to spend 16 hours of every weekend “diggin’ like a mole” (as The Aptly Named Doug once described me), then dig I shall. With long tresses. I don’t care anymore.

That said, I judge myself. Just a tad. Maybe “judge” is too strong a word. But I got pretty frustrated a month or so back, during a wretched spell where I couldn’t dig a worm.

It started at the Club Hunt. We’d received permission to return to the Blissful Meadows of Bounty (as I shall refer to them, so that you’ll have no way to track them and pillage them further) where we hunted last June when it was 100 degrees. Cheryl had skunked me good that day (heel plate) and I was determined to return the favor on this gorgeous, cool, sunny day. There were about 40 of us out there swinging away.

Oddly, in a copse of trees, I came across a “lost” sculpture by 20^th Century French cubist Georges Braque, obviously wrought during his farm implement period. 

Love it!

But I didn’t find much in the ground except for horseshoes and assorted rusted iron crap.

Here’s my inner conversation when I realize that the signal I’ve been digging is only going to yield a square piece of rusted iron that possibly was once a hoe:

Me:  Oh. Piss and moan. SIGH.  Maybe I should just leave this here, rebury it…

Me:  Nope. Put it in your fanny pack and bring it home. Or throw it out.

Me: It won’t fit in the fanny pack.

Me: You can’t leave it here. How about an art project! This would make an excellent mobile!

Me: Are you kidding me? I have no skills. OK. I’ll take it home and put it on the volcano-sized pile of rusted iron by the back door. Perhaps I can learn some craft techniques.

I dug nothing good that day, but soothed my disappointment by finding some old glass insulators just sitting under some trees.

Yay. Insulators. 

Here are the clear winners of the day. Sadly, neither of the hands shown are mine.

Made a quick trip up to Ann Arbor for some gigs and to celebrate my kids’ birthdays and brought along a couple of machines. Sadly, my fallow spell continued. Some friends invited me out into the country for fun hunt at an old school site, Peter dug part of an old practice typewriter keyboard! 

Linda dug a gorgeous, old door handle. 

Score two for the Bounty Hunter. I, however, with the pricey machine, dug part of some old whisker clippers.

Eww.

Spent a transcendent hour at County Farm Park. Expected tons of trash, but the land was strangely “virgin” – hardly a signal, and with the tall trees just starting to leaf out, it was like being in northern Michigan, so peaceful, even with cars and trucks so close by.

I’d had my eye on a small park where there had once been an old fraternity and sauntered over there one day to check it out.  Here are my finds.

Top: Cadillac dashboard thingie that caused
quite a stir on Facebook, gigantic coin, 1907
 Indian head penny, green light from mower (I
actually am just making that up.)

Please take note of that gigantic coin. Do you know how excited I was to find that? I’d been thirsting to find the fabled Large Cent but never had found one. Could this be one??? Alas, no. When I got it home and cleaned it off, it revealed itself to be a “Maui Trade Dollar” – some kind of token put out by the Maui Chamber of Commerce in 1995. THANKS, rich, entitled U-M student who went to Hawaii on Spring Break and flung your Maui Trade Dollar in the dirt in some brewski-fueled rage. I was so disappointed. 

There was an Indian head penny, though, so I tried to focus on that.

Back in Nashville, my luck began to change in fits and starts. When we moved down here, I joined Big Brothers Big Sisters and was paired with an adorable kid named Hayley. Now she’s practically a teenager and way cooler than me, but she still agrees to hang out with me, particularly if I take her horseback riding.

One day I picked her up and took her out to a beautiful, rugged, old farm. While Hayley rode with her teacher, I asked the farm owner if I could check out his property with my detector. He said sure.

This place is really something. The original house, built in the 1700s, burned down 100 years ago and the little Victorian farmhouse that was built in its place is being renovated. There’s a barn, an old smokehouse, a creek, pastures, and a fairly sizeable cemetery.

Within 30 minutes, I’d found all this and was seriously crushing on this property that we will now call The Farm.

Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham, I
love this site. From top left: brass heel plate
toy gun, toy sheriff badge, round saddle thing,
mushroom-shaped MYSTERY item that is
very old. Any ideas?

 I was particularly excited because my friend, filmmaker Terri Sarris, was coming down to TN to shoot a documentary about me and my metal detecting buddies, Cheryl and Doug. And we needed LOCATIONS!

When Terri and her partner, Frank Pahl, arrived a week or two later, I had it all figured out. We’d shoot Saturday at The Farm, and Sunday at another Nashville site where Cheryl and I had found four CW bullets fairly quickly. We’ll call that site The Agency. We were SET!

Lights! Camera! Action!

Pull Tabs! Can Slaw! Foil!

Cheryl, Doug, Brenda (Doug’s wife), Terri, Frank and I arrived at The Farm on a beautiful, cloudy Saturday morning. I mean, you could film The Hobbit at this place. It’s that magical. Cheryl immediately pulled out a gorgeous Winged Mercury hood ornament off an old Ford (?) but after that it was a little disappointing, find-wise. Terri and Frank were very encouraging. They watched us swing our machines, they came in close to see what we pulled from the ground, they asked us what it all meant to us. They interviewed Doug as he sat in the doorway of the old smokehouse. We had “lunch” (popcorn and Gatorade) at a gas station, then came back for another hour or two until we were exhausted. I tried not to be goal-oriented and to trust the process.

Sunday morning, we went over to Doug's to film him there.

Then off to The Agency and again, Mother Earth got all shy and blushy and reticent. Didn’t dig hardly anything fun! CRAP! So we all piled in our cars and followed Doug and Brenda to Franklin to a huge construction site that seemed promising. Again, no kind of mother lode…

It will be interesting to see the final cut. I trust Terri to make something wondrous.

Which brings us to this weekend. Last Friday morning, I received the sad news that my sister-in-law had died suddenly, in her home in Muskegon. Lauren Hill was married to Al’s brother, Tony, and though they’d been divorced for years, Lauren was still a member of the Hill family. Her kids, Andrea and Zephyr, are two of the coolest people ever. Lauren was kind, ebullient, strong, funny, and had a laugh that I’ll never forget. She was beside me on that day in 1997 when we all gathered around Al's dad, Donald Hill, as he took his last breath. Lauren gave great hugs, and fun socks for Christmas presents.

Anyway, it was sobering news and by the end of my work day, I knew I had to get away from the computer and out into nature. I drove to The Farm for a little digging and life-pondering. I don’t know if was the absence of a film crew or the silence of the late afternoon, or the recent rain or what, but the dirt was generous and I did a lot better. Dug my first official Large Cent…

This was NOT issued by the Maui
Chamber of Commerce.

Here's a summary of my recent finds at The Farm.

Clockwise from top: old carpenter's level,
three clumps of lead, 1962 rabies tag, four
wheat pennies, I have no idea, oil lamp parts,
flat button. Center from top: token, large
cent (same one as above), Mercury dime.

 Token sidebar: I found three cool tokens at The Farm. Here they are up close:

This is from Earthman's Mercantile, a long
gone store in White's Creek, TN

Red Goose Shoes: Half the Fun of Having Feet.

Cascaret's Laxative Candy (Best for the Bowels!)
See, in the '20s and '30s, people were obsessed
with pooping and would give their kids
laxative candy. Oh, the things you learn.

Drawer pull, pocket knife, barrel spigot (I
think this is very old), two beautiful buckles,
round thing.
We dug a lot of round things.

The rest of the weekend delivered too. Doug, Cheryl and I returned to The Agency for another go-round. Here's my current stash from that site.

Heel plate, two tent eyelets, rose tag, part of
watch, button face (?), floral thing that has
the word "Coro" on the back, 1887 Seated
Liberty dime, pretty bottle top, cool hook.

What? You want to see that 1887 Seated Liberty dime up close? Of course you do.

Pretty thang...

And this evening I hit a lawn near my house that I’ve had my eye on for some time. A lovely family lives there and they were so welcoming. They actually have a fascinating piece of property for reasons that I will get into at another time. Let’s just say that humans – and maybe even pre-humans – have been coming to that particular spot on the planet for at least 300 years.

It’s buzzing with energy and history.

I was just getting ready to go, when I got a good signal and dug this.

Pompeii, anyone?

Here it is cleaned up.

Soldier doing warrior pose, but not very well.

So. Yeah. Dry spell officially over.

Love, Whit