Down in that pit sat a steel ammo can, olive drab, the kind you could buy at any Army surplus store in 1984. It had been set on bricks to keep it off the wet dirt and wrapped in a heavy trash bag. Stenciled on the lid in white house paint, in the handwriting of a kid, were five words. Do not open until 2024.
That was two years ago.
I crawled out with it and set it on the porch for the couple. Rachel and Scott had bought the house the year before. They knew the family that lived there in the eighties had three kids, and that was about it.
Scott worked the lid loose. Inside were three envelopes, each with a name on it. Kevin. Amy. Joey. There was a Polaroid of three kids sitting on this same porch in front of a Christmas tree, a cassette of top forty songs taped off the radio, a Garbage Pail Kids card, and a newspaper from the Elkins Inter-Mountain dated June 1984.
There was also a note from their dad. He wrote that the kids wanted a time capsule, so he dug the hole and poured a cap over it so it would still be there when they were grown, no matter who owned the house.
Rachel looked at the envelopes and said we could not open those. They were not ours. I agreed.
So she went on Facebook that night. It took her about an hour to find Amy Carpenter, now fifty one, a school nurse down in Beckley. Amy wrote back the next morning in all capitals. She said she forgot the whole thing ever existed.
Then she said something that stuck with me. She and her brothers had not all been in the same room since the funeral of their mother eleven years ago. There had been a fight over the house, and nobody had backed down.
Rachel told her the capsule was meant for all three of them. So Amy called her brothers. Kevin was in Pittsburgh. Joey was in Charleston. They had not spoken in years.
They all came in October. Rachel and Scott had them for supper, and they asked me to come since I was the one who found it. Those three sat on the porch where the Polaroid was taken, gray hair now, and opened their letters.
Kevin, at fourteen, had written that he hoped he was a pilot and that his brother and sister were still his best friends. Amy wrote that she hoped she still had Mom. Joey was eight. His letter just said he hoped they still lived here together and that nobody was ever mad.
Joey read his out loud, and his voice gave out on that last line. Kevin reached over and put his arm around him. Amy started laughing and crying at the same time. By the end of the night they were passing that old cassette around and arguing about who picked the songs.
They made a new time capsule before they left. Rachel and Scott let them bury it right back in that same pit. Open in 2044, it says.
Nineteen years I have been crawling under houses. I never thought I would find a family down there.