I set my sledge down real slow, because when I broke through that fresh-poured cap and put my flashlight down into the lined compartment sunk in the ground, it was not the cold thing my chest was bracing for. It was a dry, sealed box the size of a small trunk, and it was full of childrens things.
No horror. A time capsule, lined and buried, capped under a patio slab where nobody would ever break their own concrete.
Inside were toys, cassette tapes, school photos, and a stack of letters in childrens handwriting, each in its own envelope.
The family who sank that compartment under the patio had not been hiding anything sinister, they had buried a time capsule the day they poured the slab, letters their kids wrote to their own future selves, meant to be dug up decades later at a family reunion that, from the look of the dates, never came to be.
A laminated card on top explained it. A father had poured that patio the summer his kids were small, and the whole family had made a capsule, every child writing a letter to open in twenty-five years, to be dug up together when they were grown. But families scatter, and houses get sold, and the reunion date on the card had come and gone with the house already in strangers hands.
The card read: To our family, on the day we dig this up together. If you are not us, we are sorry we did not make it back. Please find our kids and give them what they wrote. They will want to meet who they used to be.
The couple who hired me set the hot tub aside for a day and made calls instead. The names on the envelopes and the town were enough. We found all three of those kids, grown and scattered across the country, none of whom remembered the capsule existed.
They arranged to open it together on a video call, each reading the letter their eight-year-old self had written, laughing and wiping their eyes two thousand miles apart. Then they flew in and dug the rest up in person, the reunion the capsule had waited twenty-five years for, held at last in a stranger backyard that could not have been kinder about it.
Eighteen years setting tubs and I never found the like. A fresh patch in an old patio turned out to be a family time capsule that outlived the family reunion, and I got to break the cap and finally bring those grown kids back together over the letters they wrote as children.