Buried Treasure

One hot sultry Saturday in the summer of 1946 two sisters, Lucille and Peggy faced a bathtub full of mustard greens. Walter and Lucille’s garden had flourished.

With the attitude that “nothing should go to waste”, Walter and Dutch picked a mountain of greens and then decided to go hunting and leave the work of canning to the women. Lucille and Peggy attacked those greens with vengeance, washing canning jars, cleaning the mustard greens, and then the hot process of canning. They sweated and worked, all the while thinking of their husbands out having fun. The mound in the bathtub seemed to grow instead of getting smaller.

Finally they decided, “This is not worth it.” With heads together, they devised a plan. They carried all those greens to the back yard, dug a big hole with Walter’s shovel and buried the greens. Later when Walter and Dutch came home from hunting, they found jars of mustard greens in the kitchen, but never knew what treasure was buried near the garden.

Sixty years later both sisters cannot tell the story without laughing about how they fooled their husbands and got rid of the greens.