When I was younger - I guess it was between the time you can wipe your own arse and before everything starts sucking - I actually had a garden. None of this slabs-of-concrete-bollocks or a little puddle of stones tossed half-arsedly around pretentious statues. No, we had real grass that shone a vibrant green come spring and turned a murky shade of yellow in the autumn. To be honest, I might complain about it but I never used the garden. I was too busy trying to beat Megaman 2 on my hand-me-down (not that I'm ungrateful, mind) NES.
One day we decided to take one of those little spades you get in seaside towns and start to dig, hunting treasure. This mut have been around the time a portion of the garden was sacrificed in favour of a "conservatory" that never served any purpose until it was turned into a kitchen. We dug all day and found nothing of interest; just crappy stones that we buried again. As the day crept toward it's end, however, we made a discovery!
I can't remember who found it - it could have been either of my sisters, my father, or myself - but being the selfish little gobshite that I was, I quickly assumed possession of the one and only piece of treasure I've ever seen.
It was small, square block of brown brick that easily fit into the palm of my hand. On one side of the brick, though, was a material similar to that of, say, a bathroom or kitchen tile. This white tile was covered in small black cracks, though it never showed any sign of falling apart. There was also an odd design on the tile of some strange circular blue and orange shape.
My mind immediately began to race with ideas of what my newfound relic was:
Images of a ruined temple that sat where my house now stood came to me, filled with dangerous traps, rivers of lava, and lizard men armed with long iron spears that guarded whatever secrets the temple held.
I saw visions of an old mansion where the white-tiled floor was walked on every day by a balding butler, attending to the demands of his grumpy but monetarily-generous employer who simply sat in bed beneath a red velvet blanket, waiting to die.
The familiar grey, large-headed shape of an alien stepped back into his ship with a sigh, ready to go home and deliver the news that he had failed to find any sentient life on the third rock from the sun. As the vessel launched itself into the air, part of it crumbled and fell off to be buried in the earth and dug up by myself, thousands of years later.
I got to thinking about this today, and I realised something sad. If I found that little, insignificant tile today, aged 21...
I'd probably chuck it.
Image by Todd Powelson
One day we decided to take one of those little spades you get in seaside towns and start to dig, hunting treasure. This mut have been around the time a portion of the garden was sacrificed in favour of a "conservatory" that never served any purpose until it was turned into a kitchen. We dug all day and found nothing of interest; just crappy stones that we buried again. As the day crept toward it's end, however, we made a discovery!
I can't remember who found it - it could have been either of my sisters, my father, or myself - but being the selfish little gobshite that I was, I quickly assumed possession of the one and only piece of treasure I've ever seen.
It was small, square block of brown brick that easily fit into the palm of my hand. On one side of the brick, though, was a material similar to that of, say, a bathroom or kitchen tile. This white tile was covered in small black cracks, though it never showed any sign of falling apart. There was also an odd design on the tile of some strange circular blue and orange shape.
My mind immediately began to race with ideas of what my newfound relic was:
Images of a ruined temple that sat where my house now stood came to me, filled with dangerous traps, rivers of lava, and lizard men armed with long iron spears that guarded whatever secrets the temple held.
I saw visions of an old mansion where the white-tiled floor was walked on every day by a balding butler, attending to the demands of his grumpy but monetarily-generous employer who simply sat in bed beneath a red velvet blanket, waiting to die.
The familiar grey, large-headed shape of an alien stepped back into his ship with a sigh, ready to go home and deliver the news that he had failed to find any sentient life on the third rock from the sun. As the vessel launched itself into the air, part of it crumbled and fell off to be buried in the earth and dug up by myself, thousands of years later.
I got to thinking about this today, and I realised something sad. If I found that little, insignificant tile today, aged 21...
I'd probably chuck it.
Image by Todd Powelson
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