I now wish Bruce and I had thought to save the first few rusty nails we found along our front porch steps and walkway. By now we’d have about 10, instead of the three in a small white bowl.
It’s been about a week since Bruce discovered a trio of rusty nails a few feet from our front door.
“Weird,” he said, as he tossed them in the trash. After that he wandered all over our front yard and driveway area in search of other rusty nails, just in case he’d missed some that would cause a flat tire.
The next day I found two more nails, exactly in the same places Bruce had looked the previous day. Like Bruce, I looked hard to find other nails, but found none.
The following day I found one in plain sight on the bottom step.
The nails all had that deliberately placed look of a dead-mouse offering delivered to the doorstep.
But what animal delivers rusty nails? And where were these odd-sized nails coming from? We have no nails like that around our property.
I could kick myself now for throwing all those nails away. How were we to know there’d be more?
I fished the last nail out of the garbage can and put it in a small bowl. Since then, my nail collection has grown to four.
These nails intrigue us.
It’s been more than two years since we finished building our house, but even so, any construction mess is long, long gone.
Did some ne’er-do-well throw the nails the 70 feet or so from the main road to our entryway? Not likely. Nails are lightweight. And if propelled by someone who could throw nails that far, you’d think the nails would be widely scattered instead of landing in the same approximate location.
Did an animal bring us the nails as gifts, much as a proud cat will deliver dead mice to its master’s doorstep? If so, what kind of animal would do that? And why? These aren’t shiny, new nails. These look fragile and ancient, like they were uncovered from an old dig.
We’re stumped, but trying to keep an open mind.
The nails reminds us of last summer’s unsolved cedar-plank salmon mystery. One minute a full salmon fillet was baking nicely on its cedar plank inside our closed, hot barbecue.
The next minute it was gone. When Bruce lifted the barbecue lid he found a vacant cedar plank. No fish.
We found it lying on the ground behind the grill, completely intact and perfectly baked.
But I was talking about our mysterious rusty nails.
And everyone knows that rusty nails and cedar-planked salmon have nothing in common.
Except at our house.
