This Place is a Dump; or, What's Under That? Lawn Edition

So, one day, Chris asked me to fill up some buckets from an ash pile out in the lawn so that we could use the ash to fill in some holes elsewhere in the lawn. Yes, the lawn is incredibly uneven.

I started to dig... and it quickly turned out that this was not just an ash pile. It was a burn pile. As in, the place where previous owners dumped their garbage and then burned it, either in the days before or as a free alternative to municipal trash service.

The thing is that those previous owners didn't just put things in the pile that would actually burn. For instance, glass. I filled about two five-gallon buckets with broken pieces of glass, and that's only digging down about 3 - 4 inches in a space about the size of a twin bed.

And speaking of beds...

I also pulled out a boxspring? mattress? one excrutiating coil at a time, including at least two times when we had to hook a loop of metal coil over the hitch of the truck in order to pull it out from the ground.

This past weekend, Chris finally (and bravely) took a rototiller to that area, which -- in addition to evening the ground out quite a bit -- turned up even more broken glass and a few more coils of bed. Guess we'll be embarking on another archeological dig through the recent past soon. At least we don't have to come home, carefully wash it all, and then try to reassemble all the pieces in order to learn about the previous occupants...