Nov 3, 2016 4 min read

We were having dinner when the farmer reached into his pocket and handed me a small gold heart. Let’s not go down the Isn’t that romantic path; it was covered in dirt.

He’d found the heart in the garden. It was about a half inch long, in a puffed shape, and was covered by about 30 sparkly stones.

“Probably junk,” I said. But the farmer, being a man who knows a lot about a lot of things and also one who’s familiar with garden dirt, did not agree.

“Look how sparkly the stones are,” he said. He was thinking diamonds.

Over the next few days he talked a lot about the heart. He polished and buffed it, called a jeweler, walked around with it. He remarked on how heavy it was for its size, bouncing it in his hand. He would turn the heart from side to side, asking me to join him in marveling at how the light bounced off all those stones.

Now, I have found lots of things in that yard. Decades’ worth of kids played in that yard. A day outside raking leaves is likely to unearth toy cars and deflated tennis balls and other trinkets of childhood. But I had no fantasy that the heart was a long-lost treasure of any worth.

But the farmer thought this might be something. There had to be a reason he picked up the heart three different times and tossed it back into the leaves three times before finally keeping it.

On the front, nestled among the stones, was a marking of some words. They were too small and too worn to read, but they got me thinking.

What if those words were Louis Comfort Tiffany? A girl doesn’t watch 10 dozen episodes of “Antiques Roadshow” without learning a thing or two about the shocking value of some found items. Didn’t that one lady find a medieval pith helmet in her attic? It was worth two hundred fifty grand, despite her having spiffed it up with Comet.

“Better stop touching it,” I told the farmer, finally. What if this were some ages-old bauble, the prized possession of a doctor’s daughter who lived in our house when it was first built in 1899? What if that young lady’s grandmother had once been in love with a prince, who had given her the heart on a slender gold chain? And against the advice of the doctor not to lose it, the daughter wore the heart necklace while playing croquet in the side yard of this very house, and lost it.

What if? Could that little heart hold not only a rich history but also the ability to make us rich?

The farmer got out his jeweler’s loupe – I couldn’t begin to explain why he owns one – and had a closer look.

“I think it says Juicy Couture,” he said.

My heart sank. Anyone with a teenage daughter knows that is a bit of costume jewelry. Juicy is one of those expensive brands for which you pay for the name.

“Worthless,” I said.

Turns out it wasn’t gold or diamonds, and not the stuff of royal history. It was likely the zipper pull from a hooded jacket of a young girl playing in the yard last spring.

The farmer was disappointed. During those days when he thought it might be something valuable, he never talked about money; he liked the idea of having found something with a history. I was thinking dollar signs, when he was thinking back story.

Last I checked, the little heart was still on his desk.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.