BONES!

No. Not the new TV show on Fox. But real bones in our backyard. You see when we bought the cabin there was an old trailer on the property that was boarded up but standing which was good enough for us. We figured that that is where we will store all the salvaged material we rescue from the old house . Little did we know that when we opened up the trailer we were in for quite a surprise. This is a shot of the trailer after Greg spent a lot of time and a great deal of energy cleaning it out.

But this is what he spent all that time and energy taking out...piles and piles of bones.... A LOT of bones. Big ones, some little ones, mostly all sawed into pieces. One small vertebrae. Some unrecognizable fragments. We're talking roughly 4-5 wheelbarrows full of bones, perhaps more. Now, we found this pretty creepy but it got even creepier...

These pieces you see here are have the diameter of a baseball. They are fairly large. (Click on the pictures to make them bigger)

You see when you buy and old house that needs a lot of fixing up you must also have tools. Yarn and books and toy trains...yeah we got a lot of that stuff...but tools...those we needed. So off we went to our local hardware store to get us some fixin tools. Well, you see, while I was way on the other side of our 2 acres maintaining hiking trails with Jorn, Greg was on the opposite end of the land cleaning the trailer. I went to clip some overgrown brush and all of a sudden my trimmer handle just fell off and at that very moment I heard Greg yell from the other side "Abi, you better come and take a look at this"...When I got there Greg was standing with the handle of his rake but the rake part had gone flying off at what must have been the same time mine did and disappeared into the woods. These were good quality, new tools. At that point Greg showed me a 3 foot high mound he had started raking in to which was literally a pile of bones. Talk about a "Do NOT Disturb" sign...

Here are our broken tools. We still can not find the rake head. Needless to say at this point we called it a day and left the mound undisturbed. We are intrigued though by this new mystery which will most likely just add up to the bones being the remnants of a farming lifestyle. Though that doesn't explain why someone would put bones in a trailer?! But people do strange things. Somehow interesting properties sort of gravitate toward us I think. In Cornwallville, NY (our old farmhouse) we decided one day to clean the old hay out of the barn which was at least a good foot deep. Armed with pitchforks and dustmasks Greg and I pulled the pickup truck up to the loft door and started forking all we could out into the trucks bed. It wasn't long before we realized that there wasn't just a foot of hay on the floor but rather 150 year old documents that belonged to the original owner of the house , the Reverend Scott Inglis, including personal letters, postcards, checks, bills, Christmas cards!! It was a historians dream. And there it had sat for all those years secretly secure under a bed of hay. So, you never know what you will find or why people do what they do but you sure won't get stories like that buying a prefab modular hunk of junk.

The day wasn't all strange discoveries though. It was actually quite fun and we are getting a lot of work done. Here is a picture of the boys after a long, hard days work, sitting on the edge of our newest adventure.