Last week, my cousin wrote about the bond she shares with her digging partner (husband). After reading her post, I started thinking about the bonds I've made with both digging partners and property owners alike. If you're a regular follower of this blog or happen to watch my videos, you've probably realized that I have a lot of digging partners. There's Roman, Bill, Mike, Duane, Ed, Ciara, Don, Brandon, and Aaron... to name a few. For a few weeks last year, I even dragged my husband and kids along on my adventures. In all honesty, I'm not all that picky about who I'm digging with as long...

I am an enigma. The more I interact with experienced diggers and historians, I've begun to realize that strangers have a tendency to underestimate me. I'm underestimate-able. You aren't likely to find underestimate-able in the dictionary--however--I do like the ring of it. (Underestimate-able, adjective: a person, place, or thing that is thought to be smaller or less than it actually is.) For all intensive purposes, consider me underestimate-able. A few years ago, I embraced that perception. When I was picking for profit at yard sales and estate sales, I took full advantage of my clueless...

I'll admit that I've been on a glass kick lately. Obviously, not a single one of my detectors can find glass--but I've mastered a method for finding bottle shards and china fragments. Are you ready for this? I call it... the random-hole-digging-method. You may be asking yourself, what is this random-hole-digging-method and how can I sign up. Well, I'm about to tell you... Sometime last week, I decided to leave the detector in the trunk of my Forester. Instead, I grabbed my shovel and set off to find myself a bottle dump or privy. For those of you who follow my blog, this is the brick house...

I can still remember my sixth birthday party. At the time, we were living in Sandwich, MA. My dad was the senior pastor of the baptist church. We lived in the parsonage, which was built off the main parking lot behind the church building. But this particular parking lot wasn't really a parking lot at all--not to a six year-old, anyway. This particular parking lot was a vast and tumultuous seascape with roaring waves and hideous creatures rising from the deep. Honestly, I forget the details of the party. The cake might have been strawberry? There could have been two or five friends? I assume...

A few weeks ago, I wrote a story about how I obtained permission for a house that was instrumental in leading over a thousand slaves to their freedom--The Wright House. This weekend, I had the opportunity to stand beside that very pile of rubble and contemplate everything that the home had stood for. I must admit, the whole experience was a bit surreal. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PinFhc1dorA I think that everyone has a different motive for digging and--as I've mentioned before--my motive is to recover that buried shred of history that can connect me to the past. Before I bought my metal...

Last Spring, my uncle came to me with a question: "Hey, are those old insulators worth anything?" To which I responded to the affirmative. He then proceeded to tell me that in the 1960s, he was responsible for taking down all the radial wave street lamps in nearby Mount Holly Springs, PA. Rather than throw them in the dumpster like most would, my uncle brought them home and piled them in his back woods for target practice. Now, fast forward to 2014. I find myself traipsing through his backyard, hauling these things out in a wheelbarrow and loading them into the back of my Subaru. These mammoth...