Underbrush

She looked around the dark attic space. “Well I don’t see anything worth going through” she whispered to Emili. Emili continued to look around, “What about this?” as she pointed to a dusty old box with the word “KEEP” on the side. Sheena looked at the box with a disgusted look on her face, “Ugh, I guess I can look through this, let’s take it down so we can actually see what is in it.” Emili grabbed the box and followed Sheena into the dining room.

The girls have been going through Sheena’s parents old house deciding what needs to be kept, sold, or thrown away. At this point Sheena didn’t think anything was worth keeping except for the farm itself. There was just so much stuff to go through. She secretly just wanted to light a match and watch it all burn away so she wouldn’t have to deal with any of it. But they had to sell some of it, they needed money to keep their parents farm and they only had 2 weeks to come up with it.

“Look!” Emili was going through the old box. “Sheena, we really should keep this!” “What is it?” Sheena asked. Emili picked up an old photo album out of the box and opened it. There was a black and white photo of their grandparents. They looked so beautiful. They flipped through the pages. There were mostly family photos, but towards the end there were some photos they did not recognize. Maybe they were old photos of their parents as kids or some cousins of theirs.

Emili continued to look through the box. She pulled out a small black notebook. She dusted the cover off. It was very small, about the size of a computer mouse. The cover was heavily worn like someone had it in their pocket for a very long time. Sheena gently grasped the notebook and carefully opened the cover. The pages were very thin and yellowed with age. Some were folded and torn. It smelled like the notebook hasn’t been opened in years. There was a bookmark close to the end. Sheena delicately opened to the bookmarked page. The bookmark looked like something she probably made for her Dad as a small child, her Dad loved to read books. On the page she saw a drawing. “Look, Emili! This looks like map, but it is really hard to see.” Emili grabbed a magnifying glass off the table that their parents used to read the daily newspaper. “Yes, I recognize this place! This looks like our old playhouse that we made from the underbrush by the big oak tree,” Emili said laughing. “Yes! I haven’t been out there in years! I wonder if all our creations are still out there. Like the table we made from tree branches. And all those hard-red clay mud pies!” Chuckled Sheena. “Do you remember when we both got poison ivy from collecting those branches?” laughed Emili. “Yeah and poor Mom got it from us when trying to clean it off! I felt so bad about that. But we learned our lesson!” Sheena said. “Do you want to go check it out for old times sake? And try to find out what this map leads us to?”

They made their way to the back of the property with the old small notebook and magnifying glass in hand. Their parents had a chicken farm with 5 houses, 3 were dilapidated because they were too old to renovate whereas the other 2 had been used for another 20 or so years. Although all the chicken houses hadn’t been used in quite some time it still smelled like manure. “Ugh, I do not miss this smell!” Sheena coughed. They found the entrance to their playhouse in the underbrush. It looks like someone has been out there recently. Emili looked at the map again, “it looks like its pointing to the kitchen where we stored those clay mud pies.” They ducked through each of the rooms in the playhouse. There was a living area where there was still a couple of play chairs half buried and a TV made of red clay, there was a bedroom where there was a couple of dolls laying in the clay mud, then there was a back room that they called the kitchen. It was further back in the brush, so it was very shady and cool. They spent most of their childhood in this room. They noticed the table was still there and sitting on top of the table was a brown rusted metal box by some of their clay mud pies. “I can’t believe these pies are still intact!” said Emili. Sheena picked up the metal box, “It’s locked.” Emili looked at the map again, “This map looks like its pointing to this back corner, I guess something is buried here?” As she pointed to a small mound in the clay mud, they didn’t notice at first. Sheena walked toward the corner and knelt beside the mound, “I am really excited! It is like we are kids again,” Sheena smiled. She saw an old rusty garden trowel they used to make the clay mud pies. She picked it up and slowly started dig. Red clay is very hard to dig through, she had removed just a small amount of clay when she felt something, she dug around it, it was a rock. She picked it up. She looked at the rock closely and quickly discovered it was a fake rock with a key compartment. She slid the bottom open and a key fell out onto the ground. Sheena picked up the key and walked towards the metal box on the table. Emili followed her. Sheena put the key in the lock and turned. She grabbed the rusted lid and it squeaked open. “What in the world?” Sheena exclaimed, “Look Emili!” she turned the box so that Emili could see inside. There was a thick stack of $20 dollar bills. Sheena and Emili took the box back to the house and counted it, there was $20,000. “Oh my, this is more than enough to keep the farm, Emili!” Sheena cried. Emili and Sheena danced around the dining room. They couldn’t believe it. The farm had been saved! They finally settled down and sat at the table looking at all the money. Emili looked at the metal box again. “Look, Sheena!” As she removed the plastic partition in the metal box. “There is another small black notebook.”