I was playing Red Light Green Light in my backyard the other night, and one of my kids tripped over something buried in the dirt.
It was a little piece of iron bar jutting an inch through the soil.
I guess all the heavy rains we have gotten recently leached away some of the topsoil, and exposed something buried years ago. We have lived in this house for almost a decade, and I thought I knew everything about it, inside and out, but this was something new. Luckily my kid didn’t twist their ankle! They went inside and I got out the shovel, and dug up what turned out to be an eight foot length of rebar rod. There were a series of wire ties around the rod, which had been underground for over a decade but still looked as strong as ever. That’s the thing about rebar rods and wire ties – they are basically invulnerable to the elements and the passage of time. Another thing that people don’t realize is that rebar rods and wire ties can be very dangerous, so you have to be careful with them. My Uncle Pedro lost one of his fingers, because he didn’t take off his pinky ring before working with wire ties and rebar rods. The double loop bar tie caught around his ring and POP pulled the finger right out of his hand. After I remove this rebar rod from the yard I need to borrow a metal detector and see if anything else dangerous might be buried out there in the yard.