Spitball Army

During an overhaul of the basement this past weekend, I found a lot of junk. Most of it had been there for so long that it was irreparably damaged by moisture – moisture in the air, primarily, though there was some ground water damage on a few things. The majority of this stuff made its way into garbage bags and hit the road this morning when the trashmen made their rounds.

While I was trudging back and forth between the basement and the street, carrying bags filled with debris, my eye caught a glimmer, something catching the sunlight from beneath one of the flower boxes on the front of the house. I stopped and looked, not wanting to have a nail exposed, thinking that’s what it must have been. On closer inspection, I saw a battery fastened to the wooden bottom of the planter.

It wasn’t nailed or glued in place. All I had to do was slip the tip of a fingernail between one edge of it and the wood and it popped right off. There is no telling how long it had been there, nor how it got there. My best guess is that the last time I had taken the boxes down for either cleaning or planting or painting, it must have been on the ground and got picked up by the alchemic magic of heat and paint. The battery didn’t look that old, but I honestly can’t remember the last time I’d taken those down. The planters were re-painted when the house was painted, maybe five or six years ago.

Late Sunday morning, I was dismantling a shelf in the stairwell leading into the basement. It had been fastened in an opening over the second step heading down, and I was bumping my forehead on the edge of it with painful regularity. There wasn’t much to it, just a couple pieces of wood nailed to the wall. But, many years ago, it must have been a secret hiding place for one of the boys who grew up in this house.  There were two sons, close to me in age, in the family that occupied this home before I purchased it in 1995.

I found three wrappers for the delicious and wonderful peanut butter and coconut confection known as Chick-O-Sticks. Yum!

I also found something that sent my mind jetting back to my childhood days. One lonely ViewMaster stereo viewing reel was buried beneath a handful of rusty tacks and a piece of cardboard.

Here are shots of three of the transparencies on this reel:

I used to collect these, and had a big stack of ViewMaster reels in one of the drawers of my bedroom dresser.  The Disneyland ones were especially cool, and I think I had most of them.