A wooden box of sand.

A wooden box of sand sat in my attic for 36 years. It was there when I bought the house, and was too heavy and possibly messy for me to move by myself, so I just left it there. I never mentioned it to anybody. Why would I? Sand is pretty inoffensive and static. You don't bother it, it won't bother you. It never decayed or spoiled, and you don't need a license to have it. It's not listed on the stock exchange. It's silent and has no smell. Sand will never be a hot button issue. I wish more things, and more people, were like sand.

I rented a wife and three children to live in the house with me for the first ten years, but it didn't work out. They complained about the linoleum in the kitchen and wanted to get a cat. So I exchanged them at the Rent-A-Center for a seat on the local Zoning Board. I found this much more fulfilling and interesting. We would discuss parking lots and mixed use designations late into the night. As the years went by we became more and more powerful, until at last we wrenched control of the entire city from the mayor and city council. We changed the name of the city to Buttigieg and raised the sales tax on food and clothing to fifteen percent. There were complaints, naturally, but we had the police scatter thumbtacks in the front yards of those who whined too much, and that soon did the trick. And when the Governor called out the National Guard to have us arrested on charges of bribery and extortion, we had the fire department use their water canons to disperse the troops until most of them fled in terror and were swept away in the Mississippi at flood tide. We captured the survivors and put them to work painting white lines down the middle of residential streets. The Governor didn't bother us again.

During all this upheaval I sometimes went up into the attic to check on my wooden box of sand. It never changed. Once I saw a tiny red spider mite try to cross it, but halfway across it turned back and died before it could return to safety. That was interesting.

I was certain the other members of the zoning board would never let me retire and lead a peaceful life -- I knew too much. So I planned very carefully, and when the time came I secretly let in a contingent of the National Guard to take them all away to the dungeons in the Governor's Mansion. For my civic service the Governor appointed me Head Ranger at Drumlins State Park. I had my house, wooden box of sand and all, moved off its foundations and transported by semi to the Park, where it was moored next to the Ice Age National Scientific Reserve. All at government expense. Then I went fishing.

There are a fascinating variety of fish to be caught in the lakes and rivers of the Upper Midwest. The small mouth tench is a ferocious fighter when caught on a hook; it often dials 911, but since it has no larynx it can't say anything. Cooked in butter it tastes like the island of Sappho. The blue sterlet has a peculiar mating call, something like a cross between a rusty Ferris wheel and a leaky garden hose. You can lure it into your net by simply whistling any show tune that was composed prior to 1957. The twisted muskellunge prefers shallow thinking, where it can be caught with either a dinky or a flandellete. 

Things were going along swimmingly for me, as the years piled up and my canvas trousers eventually took on the permanent odor and flecked scales of a fish market. And my wooden box of sand became even more precious to me. I would gaze at if for hours, as the sun from the dusty octagonal attic window burnished it like old bronze. But then one of my fellow members from the old zoning board escaped his fetters in the dungeons of the Governor's Mansion and came hunting me, for revenge. When I saw Zinkfelt standing in my kitchen, wild-eyed and in fetid rags, I knew the jig was up. He had a metal spatula in his hand. In a panic, I ran up the stairs to the attic, with Zinkfelt right behind me. 

We faced off across the wooden box of sand.

"It's grit" he said to me, with a hollow voice.

"What's that?" I asked him.

"Your box -- it's full of grit" he replied.

"You mean sand" I told him.

"I know the difference between sand and grit" said Zinkfelt. "We were fed sand for breakfast in the dungeons, and grit for lunch and dinner. You got a box of grit there."

With unnatural strength I lifted up the deceitful wooden box and hurled it through the octagonal window. It landed with a thick crash on a shoal of geodes. Then Zinkfelt and I went out to dinner, but didn't leave a very big tip because the crab Rangoon was too chewy.