Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Time once more to delve into my collection of oddities, piled up on top of my computer for days when I'm low on ideas for Musings.

First up is a card I found on my front lawn about a month ago.

This card, which is about the size of a 3-by-5 card, is printed on plain card stock in brown ink, and even if it hadn't been damp and a little muddy when I found it, would have appeared to be aged, the paper having taken on a brittle quality I recognize from old photographs and papers of that period.

From the dates on the top of the card, it appears that this is an invitation for visitors to come to call and celebrate the 50th wedding anniversary of Mr. and Mrs. James Anderson Skelton.

Now, of course, we get to the mysterious part: how did this 85-year-old invitation from Buffalo, New York, end up on my front lawn?

My best guess is that this plain brown souvenir had been passed down within a family, and that the most recent possessor of it had determined it was not worth saving. So, perhaps, they stuffed it in a trash bag and put it on the curb. A stiff breeze blew up and carried the card to my lawn instead.

Either that or I have received a time-warped invitation to a party by a very sweet and devoted but most indubitably dead couple.

Earlier this year, I found something equally interesting in my back yard, damp, having been dropped there on a cloudless day.

To see a larger version of any of these pages, simply click on them.

(If you want to read the articles, you'll have the best luck doing this in Netscape, since it doesn't automatically resize photos to fit your window.)

Again, it's odd that a National Enquirer page from April 1986 should just show up in my back yard one day, damp and aged but otherwise apparently intact. Was it stored in someone's garage, and flew outside on its own, when the box that had been keeping it pressed flat all these years was removed?

Was it another escapee from the trash? Or was it, perhaps, another strange time warped message? Some cryptic meaning to be deciphered by putting together the ads for the Rosucricians and Gene Autry albums, along with the news on J. Paul Getty's wicked ways and the hope for a cancer-free future.

My favorite item, however, is the cat who's been raising two squirrels. Perhaps that picture is why this page survived so long, pressed carefully amongst someone's belongings before arriving, damp and darkened, on my doorstep.

Or perhaps I should find meaning in the quote used as a space filler in one of the columns: "There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking." — Thomas A. Edison

Given today's haphazard Musing, that might, indeed, be it.

Copyright 2003 by Alyce Wilson

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