Blast from the past

This may be one of the coolest stories of my life. Well, there have been a few more exciting things, but seriously, I just love this!!

There's going to have to be some background information for this to appear as cool as it is, so here goes. Growing up, my family lived in the same yard all of my life. Our first house burned down when I was in 3rd grade, but we build another house in the same yard. I lived there until I went away to college. My parents, then just my mom lived there until a couple summers ago when they sold it during my parents' divorce. It was kind of sad to not have that house to come 'home' to, especially after growing up on the block--knowing the neighbors, being familiar with the area, etc. Well, that next fall my brother ended up buying the house that was next door to our old house. Is that crazy or what? Not many people buy the house next door to the house they grew up in, do they?

Now, on to the next part of the story. One year our school did a time capsule where we put special things away and sealed it for future generations to open and see what we thought was important at that time. My brother and I thought that was pretty cool, so we came home and decided to make our own time capsule. That's nothing spectacular--tons of kids make time capsules, I suppose. It was interesting, though, that we didn't bury the time capsule in our own back yard. Nope. We buried it in our next door neighbor's yard.

The yard my brother now owns.

Is that not crazy?

Well, the kids and I drove up to Michigan this week planning on attending my dad's wedding, as well as my high school best friend's wedding. My brother, Eric, and I were talking one afternoon about our time capsule and telling Jon, my dad, stepmom, stepsister and aunt about it and my dad chimes in that he has a metal detector--did we want to try to find it?

Well, yes, yes we did! I was almost giddy with excitement...

My brother with the metal detector. We both thought we had put it right by that brick wall. (The other side of that chain link fence is the yard that belongs to the house we grew up in.)
Beep beep beep beep beep!!! Right where we thought it was!!!Trying to get it open...we both remembered that we had put it in an old lunch box, and had wrapped up every thing in foil and plastic. Too bad we didn't realize how rusty and gross and deteriorated that would cause our time capsule to become!
How exciting!
A little clay clown that I had made in art class...
We couldn't remember what kind of lunch box we had used, but luckily there was just enough paint left that we could see. When we first saw the colors and rainbows we thought it was Rainbow Brite, or My Little Pony, but the winner was....Care Bears!
Close up of a few of the things we had put in--we think it must have been 1990 because of the Nintendo World Championship guide! So funny that my brother put that in there! He also put the Madball, the motorcycle and the deck of cards in.
Here is the whole loot--the big foil on the top left and the paper near it was a class picture but it was hard to see who was on it or what year it was...Also included was a bouncy ball, a coin, a school picture of Eric's best friend, a plastic doll fork and, because I've apparently always been an uber-nerd, I also included a math test on which I had received 100%. I know. Poke fun, I can take it! :)
I mean, how many people make a time capsule? On top of that, how many remember they made a time capsule, and remember where they put it? Even more, how many have access to the place where they buried it and actually go back to find it? Twenty years later?

I'm telling you. That's a cool story!