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Buried treasure on school playground

 
Published March 24, 1997|Updated Oct. 1, 2005

We yanked and pulled on our treasures, and we knew we'd found something special.

"Let's go outside," my friends and I said. We were at a holiday breakfast for school on a Saturday in December. We'd been there awhile and were bored, so the four of us decided to go out on the school playground.

The cool air felt good against my body. It sent shivers down my spine. We ran around and swung on the parallel bars.

Then we all plopped down on a brown wooden picnic bench. I saw something glittering in the soil. I bent down and snatched it up. It was just an earring or something.

"Oh well," I thought.

Then my friend sitting next to me whispered something in my ear that made me glance down again. We saw more sparkles in the dirt. Together we bent down and pulled on the shiny object.

By that time the other two girls started helping us dig. We picked up bracelets, necklaces, earrings, pins and many more pieces of costume jewelry. Purple, green, blue, gold. All the colors seemed to form a rainbow in our dirt-covered hands. We even ventured over to the parallel bars or rings to search, thinking that jewelry may be buried all over the field.

After we thought we had found everything, we spread all of the miscellaneous items out on the picnic table. We covered the entire wooden surface! Together we stared in awe at what we found. After the feeling of shock had passed, we began running and jumping and singing, "We're rich, we're rich."

All of the sudden our mothers appeared. They stared at our findings as well. They told us we should turn it in. After we put up a struggle, we decided that it was the right thing to do.

A police officer came and took the jewelry away, but in 90 days we got it back because the owners never claimed it. The four of us divided it among ourselves. I still wonder if there is any jewelry still out on the field and, if so, who will have the luck to find it?

Lauren, 12, is a student at Southside Fundamental Middle School in St. Petersburg.

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