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Lettuce Safe

For years my grand aunt had a shabby little sack in which she kept her wedding jewelry. The sack stayed buried under a pile of coal in the backyard. In her backward coal-mining town, getting a safe deposit locker was not an option.

A lot of people kept their valuables at home and not surprisingly burglaries were commonplace. Some of us in the family knew her secret hiding place and I thought it was disingenuous of her to share - what if someone overheard and decided to raid the coal bin one night ? Reading about the iceberg lettuce safe reminded me of her.

Though her gold never got raided, it had to be sold to make ends meet. By the time she died there was nothing left to hide in the coal bin. Somehow, it always sounded like the wrong thing to store gold jewelry the way she did. Feng Shui experts would doubtless attribute that to her declining fortunes by way of diamonds turning to coal in the figurative sense at least.

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