From the part of the state with all the interesting obituaries, the county where my uncle has the trading post, comes this news item:




"Lewis-Arriola (Colorado) firefighter Brian Stigelmeyer coats a car in foam Wednesday in the 13000 block of Road 23 after the 2000 Cadillac Escalade burned.

The driver, who refused to give his name, made a trip to the county dump, where a mattress caught on the rear axle of the car. After being dragged down the highway, the mattress caught fire.

Construction workers at the site tried to put the fire out with buckets of water but "once the spare tire caught on fire, it just took off," the driver said. Because of gas leaking, the firefighters used foam to be sure all of the fire was smothered."

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When I was a kid we took our trash to the city dump ourselves. This was a small town dump, people just backed up to the edge of the trash and unloaded their cars and pickup trucks. One time I was with my mother and the car ran out of gas right there. This was due to a power struggle my parents were having, she would avoid filling the gas tank, leaving it for my dad, and when he noticed it was on Empty, he'd sit in the garage with the motor running to get it really low.

Another time with my mom, we dumped out the kitchen trash, and teetering right there on the edge of the junk mail was a ring that we inherited from my aunt. It was a huge black pearl with baguette diamonds on each side. An appraiser for my aunt's estate said it was the most valuable of my aunt's jewelry. No idea how it got into the trash. I don't know what happened to it after that, but suspect my dad traded it in on a nice engagement ring for his second wife after my mother died.

The dump was a great place to find good stuff. In the 1960s my folks bought a 1936 Ford from Maude Whipple, the original owner. My sister drove it on back country roads before she had her driver's license, and somewhere she lost one of the hubcaps, which were not the standard issue for that car, but were from the 1930s. Well, after Miss Whipple died, her garage was cleaned out, and one of those hubcaps was in the stuff taken to the dump. My mother found it. Looking back, I wonder if she had inside information that it might be there, or maybe it was just luck.