What’s In Your Home’s Backyard?

When my daughter’s guinea pig, Pumpkin, died last month, I told her we would wrap it in an old towel, put it in a shoebox,  dig a hole in the backyard, say a prayer and then bury it, which we did. I made sure I dug a couple of feet deep so that raccoons and other wildlife didn’t unearth our beloved Pumpkin. So far, so good.

Now I realize this dead-pet-buried-in-the-backyard ritual seems more common than I realized — even if there are city ordinances against it.

• Recently, the Style section of the NY Times ran a first-person article about a woman’s broken marriage and in it, she talks about "…Router’s grave, where the beloved dog was laid to rest in the backyard five years earlier…"
• I recently caught the tail-end of an "Everybody Loves Raymond" rerun, where the entire family is in the backyard burying "Pumpernickel," the hamster. Raymond’s daughters tearfully ask if they can get a pet rabbit in the morning and after Raymond agrees, he turns to his wife and says, "A rabbit means it’ll be bigger hole next time."
• Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley, who was accused several years ago of wanting to move out of his neighborhood to a nicer part of the city, denied it and said he’s there to stay and something to the effect that he "would live there and be buried in his backyard next to all his kids’ hamsters and guinea pigs."

So, in knowing that I am the fourth owner of my home, I wonder what the previous owners have buried in the backyard. So far I haven’t found anything, but it makes you wonder…