STASHING STUFF: II

For years, a lot of people did not trust banks. Grandma might stash her egg money in a mason jar then bury it in her flower garden that she could see from her kitchen window. Or granddad might bury some of his earnings, from selling hogs, in the hen house. The chickens were his alarm if someone or something was around the hen house. 

Sometimes, they might stash some cash in the root cellar or maybe out by that old truck next to the barn. Some might hide valuables behind a loose brick in the fireplace. One such occurance happened years ago in the town of Central City here in Colorado. One of the store keepers needed a place to stash some of his family's treasures. 

Against one of the inside walls to his store that was all brick, he found 4 loose bricks. He managed to remove the bricks and found that he could place a metal box on end in the wall and could then replace the bricks. Once the bricks were in place, he checked from several different angles and you could not tell that the bricks had been removed.

The store owner did not tell anyone in his family about his stash hole. In it he placed some of his wife's jewelry, a diamond necklace and matching earrings that had belonged to the wife's mother, a couple of stock certificates to one of the mines outside of town, some gold coins, and a pipe and a gold pocket watch that had been his father's. Years went by and his business was good. Then the flu epidemic hit the town. 

His wife caught the flu and passed. A few weeks later the store owner caught it also. He never told anybody about his stash. Years later all of the shops that were on main street were remodeled. Some opened as ice cream parlors, rock shops, or a little burger joint. Tourists came to Central City to pan gold or go on tours.The store from our story here was opened as one of them stores were you could buy cowboy hats, rubber tomahawks -- you know, the kind of tourist trap stores. 

Anyway, at the back of this store they had a glass case set up. In it was the contents of the metal box that had been in the wall for all of those years. The new owners wanted a bigger store, so they bought the shop next to them, and busted out the inside wall to make a large walkway between the shops. They found the box and contents. I must have been around 7 or so when I first got to see this stash.

Now its gone. Gambling is now the thing of Central City.

Another good place to maybe stash some of your stuff might be in your laundry room. Laundry soap has come a long way since I was a kid and the packaging has changed also. Tide, and some others, now have these little pod things with soap and brighteners and such. Most people buy more than one of these plastic containers. 

Why not, after using up all of those pod things, stash some of your goodies in the plastic container? Place it right back up on your laundry shelf with all of the other laundry goods you have. The containers are of a good size. You should be able to load it up pretty good. Just don't load it so heavy that you can't pick it up. When you need to stash things, try to "think outside the box." I've thought of some other places to stash things. But I'm going to save those ideas for now.