The Mystery of the Holy Tupperware Lid

 

We recently got a new back deck. The old one was well past its prime and overdue for replacement. The new one, made from Trex decking material, is bigger and better in every way.

In the process of tearing down the old deck, our contractor Evan found the faded, beat-up Tupperware lid pictured above. Terry had been looking for that lid for years and never would have guessed it had somehow ended up underneath our deck.

What was most intriguing, though, was the small rectangular hole cut into the middle of the lid. When Terry sent a picture of it to our family group text chat, there was speculation that perhaps some critter or other had chewed through the lid during its long years of dark isolation under the deck.

But upon closer inspection, the hole seems too rectangular and clean to be the work of a raccoon or possum. Plus, there appear to be slice marks around the hole, which would suggest that someone had taken a knife and intentionally cut out a small square of the plastic.

When you live for many years in a house of seven people, five of whom are children, you usually assume the "someone" in situations like this is one of your offspring. You don't try to make sense of it, because there is no making sense of it. There is no logical answer to why someone would cut a hole in a Tupperware lid and then hide it outside beyond, "Well, we have kids, you see..."

Terry and I are at a stage of life where our older children feel comfortable confessing various illegal and otherwise inadvisable things they did while growing up. At least one of these stories comes out at every family gathering, and as I've said before, I am simultaneously amused, fascinated and horrified when it does.

No one fully owned up to cutting the hole in the lid and hiding it, but Jack thinks it's fairly likely that he was the culprit. He doesn't specifically remember doing it, but in his own words, "It seems like the kind of dumb thing I would have done when I was little."

So mystery solved, I suppose. The lid is no longer usable, but at least Terry can finally rest easy knowing what happened to it.

And she and I together can say a prayer of thanks that our children have all grown up safely despite occasional and egregious lapses in judgment along the way.