The job was supposed to be simple: remove a ninety-year-old maple that had been damaged in a storm. They’d been working for about forty minutes when one of the crew members suddenly shut off his saw and walked toward my porch. He didn’t even take his helmet off. He asked if I knew who had lived in the house before us.
I told him the Kerrigans had owned it since the 1950s. He nodded, then asked me to come outside and look at something inside the trunk, about eleven feet above the ground where the storm had split the tree open. He said he’d noticed something that didn’t look like natural damage.
When I walked over, I could see a small metal object wedged deep inside the hollow section. It looked old, almost like a container that had been hidden there deliberately. The crew member said the tree’s growth rings suggested whatever was inside had been there for decades.
I asked him whether the Kerrigans had ever mentioned anything about the tree. He shook his head and said there was something else that bothered him. He’d found a name carved into the wood behind the object — and it wasn’t a Kerrigan name.
Then he carefully pulled the object free. Inside was a folded piece of paper sealed in plastic, still surprisingly intact. The first line was dated 1961, and the second line was addressed to someone who, according to the property records, had never officially lived at my house.
The tree worker looked at me and said, “Ma’am, you probably want to read this somewhere private.” I unfolded the paper, read the first sentence, and immediately understood why someone had hidden it inside that tree…
