Bill once gave me a piece of advice

"Don't toss anything you don't recognize into the trash," he said. "At least not right away. You'll regret it later when that thing turns out to be something valuable."

Good advice.

Unfortunately, I didn't listen.

Earlier in the year we were hunting a field where, back in the early 1800s, a log cabin stood. I pulled a couple of Coronet largies out of the ground and a whole bunch of period buttons. I also found a newer piece that I didn't recognize but it looked interesting.

It was old, but it didn't look 200 years old like the coins and buttons I was finding, so despite Bill's advice the object when straight into the garbage with everything else in my trash pouch.

It didn't take me long to regret it. Later that week I was watching an episode of Stealth Diggers and they dug something that looked very familiar from one of their holes. I learned that what I had thrown away was an ox knob.

Now an ox knob isn't particularly valuable, but it's still a cool relic and mine was now sitting in a dump somewhere. Needless to say, I wasn't very happy with myself. The story has a happy ending, but only because I got lucky. A few days later we were back at that same field and I found another knob just like the one I had chucked into the trash. Then, a month or so after that, I found a third one at another permission. But that could have just as easily been a once in a lifetime relic I had tossed away.

So take Bill's advice, even if I didn't. Don't be too quick to throw out today's interesting piece of trash. It could be tomorrow's treasure!