Buried Treasure

   I am writing a book of stories from my life.  It is called "Grandma's Stories."  Following is one of the stories from that book.

 I don’t know if my parents planned it when they chose our home, or if was happenstance, but we lived right in the middle of all the schools that we would attend.  All of them were within walking distance.  And there were a lot of schools.  Children attended Lincoln elementary for 1^st-3^rd grade, Washington elementary for 4^th and 5^th grade, Wilson elementary for 6^th and 7^th grade, Jefferson Junior high school for 8^th and 9^th grade (all named after American presidents) and Caldwell High School for 10^th through 12^th grade.  Our home was smack dab in the middle of all of those schools.  If you marked the schools on a map and connected the dots, it would form a circle.  Our home would be almost in the very center.  I almost always walked to school until I got in high school and had a car and had to get from early- morning seminary at the church over to the high school.  Anyway, that made it nice because on Saturdays and during the summer, we could go to the elementary school playgrounds to play.  I have fond memories at playing at both playgrounds with my sister and friends. 

For some reason that I am unable to explain now, we loved to play at Washington elementary.  The elementary was built at street level, but behind the elementary it dropped off down a small hill down to the very large grassy field.  There was a full-sized softball diamond with bleachers, and a huge playing field beyond that.  But on the hill right behind my fourth-grade classroom was a large fallen log.  The log had long since been stripped of its bark, so was smooth, almost polished wood.  It was our favorite place to play.  We made forts or played house by and on that big log for hours on end.  During the summer, we would meet at that log and play and play. 

One day, we got the brilliant idea to bury treasure there.  We decided it would be fun to bury a quarter as deep as we could.  We dug and dug in the hard dirt near the log.  We only had sticks with which to dig and the dirt was hard-packed, but we determinedly dug a deep hole.  We then put the quarter in the hole and filled back in the dirt.  Our plan was to come back when we were grownups and see if we could find it.

I never forgot about our buried treasure. I would think of it every so often and wonder if it was still there.   One day, after I was married and had Kristen, so probably twenty years after I buried it, I went back to the log.  I had a vague idea of where our treasure was hidden, so I started digging.  Wouldn’t that be fun to find my quarter?  I dug and dug and dug, but was never able to find the quarter.  My guess is that someone with a metal detector found it in the intervening years.  I hope when they found it that they realized they had found a child’s true buried treasure!