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Digging at the Thrift Store

  • July 20, 2015

I've been out of commission this past month--taking a much-dreaded speech course in pursuit of my associates degree, remodeling our house with new floors and fresh paint, and chasing after two hellions--one who recently learned the word NO and the other who has it mastered. That being said, I haven't had much opportunity to fire up my new Makro Racer. I'm hoping that once this heat dissipates and I put the public speaking torture to rest, I'll find some time to hit my newest permission--an abandoned house in the woods that was once the Fickel House. Now, from creeping around in the detecting...

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Heebie-Jeebies

  • June 17, 2015

Even before I started metal detecting, I'd always had a weakness for old homes--the crumbling stone facades, the weathered brick, and paint-peeled clapboards. These properties--with their overgrown vegetation, collapsing outbuildings, and crooked shutters--possess some sort of decrepit beauty that I've always found to be both haunting and mesmerizing. I think sometimes we forget that these sad structures were once the pride of a family name, a booming industry, a community, or a righteous cause. Now, they stand in ruin and waste away to the tune of the passing decades... until someone like...

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A Little Lead Man

  • June 4, 2015

A few days after I graduated first grade, my parents uprooted our entire family and moved us out West. I traded clam chowdAH for barbecue, rolling waves for endless plains, and soda for pop. The cultural whiplash took awhile to recover from, but once I realized ya'll was essentially the same as youz-guys--I got along just fine. While living in Kansas, I remember going on lots of fields trips--this was back before schools had to worry about all that liability. Heck, all you needed was a signed permission slip and you could feed tigers at the zoo or take an inflatable raft down some wicked...

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Spoons in the Schoolyard

  • May 26, 2015

Every now and then, you knock on a stranger's door hoping to obtain a permission and you get a surprising response--sometimes its a face full of front door, sometimes its a explosion of profanity, and sometimes its the business end of a twelve gauge and a strong verbal warning to skedaddle. Then, sometimes... its a tour of the one room school house, a complete history of the area, and free rein of the hundred-and-fifty acre property. Sometime last Fall, I turned down a country road in search of a rumored property. I snaked my way through the orchards, the cornfields, and the pastures of...

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I Talk to Dead People

  • May 22, 2015

I talk to dead people. Now--hang on a second--before you call the loony bin and have me committed, you should hear me out... I talk to dead people, but the dead people don't always talk back. I mean, sometimes they do. Sometimes they give me a nudge in the right direction. Sometimes they whisper through a gust of wind. Sometimes they manifest as a crow perched in tree--constantly heckling and shouting commands. Granted, this is usually when I'm all by myself at some abandoned homestead--with no one to confirm the phenomena--but I assure you that I'm not making this stuff up. Yesterday was a horrible...

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