Pop!
The delightful sound of canning jar lids as they seal
The high pitched, tin sounding pop of a canning jar lid as it seals causes, in a split second, an entire summer to flash through my mind.
Pop!
My great uncle, Max, was plowing the field with his old, red tractor. My brother and I stood watching from the hillside above the field. We were anxious for him to finish plowing, so we could search through the freshly turned soil looking for treasure.
Long before my great, great, great grandfather arrived in the Ohio valley and started farming on this land, there had been an Indian village beside our creek, where our garden now lay.
Every spring after the field had been plowed, my brother and I looked through the giant clods of dirt. We often found arrowheads and sometimes old coins. We kept these treasures in an old shoe box under my brother’s bed and looked at them when we were bored on snowy afternoons in the middle of the winter. We made up stories about the Indians who had lived there and how the arrowheads and coins came to be lost in our field.
Max came back the next day to till the garden. The clumps turned into fine soil, soft and smooth. The garden was ready to be planted. Our treasure hunting was over for the year.
