Because the box was full of letters, and every single one of them was addressed to a child who did not exist yet.
They were in a tin, inside the box, wrapped in oilcloth so the damp wouldnt reach them. Dozens of envelopes, each one dated and sealed. The oldest went back nearly thirty years. On the outside of every one, in the same careful hand, was written the same thing. For whoever lives here next. Do not open until you need it.
Now, I have pulled a lot of things out of the ground in twenty years, and I have learned to leave what I find where I found it. So I set the tin on the grass, put the flagstone back loosely so nobody would step wrong, and called the fella who hired me.
He came out with his wife. They had bought the house from an estate. The previous owner had been a widow who lived there alone for a quarter century and had no children anybody knew of. The place had sat empty for a year before it sold.
The wife opened the first envelope right there on the walkway, and I will tell you, I stood back a ways because it felt like something I shouldnt be close to.
It was a letter about the house. Not a will, not a deed. Just a letter. It said that the furnace made a noise in November that sounded like trouble but wasnt. That the apple tree by the fence would look dead until the first week of May and then surprise you. That the neighbor on the north side was lonely and would bring soup if you let him, and you should let him.
It said that the writer had buried this because she had moved into the house as a young wife knowing nothing, and her own mother-in-law had taught her everything by letter, one a month, from three states away, and those letters had saved her more times than she could count. And since there was no daughter-in-law coming to teach, she would teach the house itself, and leave it for whoever came.
The wife read it out loud and then just stood there holding it.
There were thirty-one letters. One for every year the widow had lived there. Each one had something in it. Which pipe froze. Where the good light came in for reading. How to tell when the roof needed looking at before it told you itself. In one of them she had pressed a seed packet from the tomato variety that grew best in that soil.
The last letter was dated the spring before she passed. It was short. It said that she knew she was going and that she was not afraid, because the house would have somebody, and somebody would have the letters, and that was as close to a family as she had managed, and it had turned out to be enough.
She had hidden the box where a stranger would be sure to find it, under the one stone that would ring hollow to anyone who cared enough to tap.
I reset the walkway that afternoon. Fixed the base, leveled every stone. I asked the couple what they wanted done with the hollow one, and the husband said to put it back exactly where it was.
They had decided to keep the box in the ground. They were going to add a letter every year, same as she did, for whoever came after them.
I laid the stone back over it and tapped it once with my knuckle to make sure it still rang. It did. I figure it always will, and I figure thats the point.