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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Walks have turned up treasures By HANK HENRY For years, Nora and I have walked a two-mile route through our Medford neighborhood almost every morning, and sometimes we find interesting things. Over the past 20 years, we have picked up coins, currency, a man's identification, a wicked-looking knife, a pair of scissors, stolen mail and lately, plenty of sack lunches. We used to kid each other that by the time we retired, we would probably have found a million dollars. Actually, we have found only about $20 or so, but looking for things along our route has been one incentive to keep us walking. Nora found the knife one day when she was out walking by herself. I had gone to some breakfast meeting, and she was out before 8 a.m., with rush-hour traffic streaming down Barneburg Road, when she spotted a folding knife by the street. The 4-inch blade was open. Nora decided it probably belonged to someone in the house near where she found it, so she walked down the path to the front porch. When she rang the doorbell, she heard movement inside, but no one opened the door. It never occurred to her that the sight of a woman on the front porch with an open knife in her hand probably wasn't very reassuring to the the person inside. A woman finally came to the door when she convinced herself that Nora was not a slasher. Several years ago, we found a man's identification papers strewn along Siskiyou Boulevard. We headed for the address on the documents, and learned that the night before a thief had stolen a man's wallet from his apartment and someone had stolen a woman's car. The thief or thieves had apparently driven away from the apartment house in the hot car, throwing identification papers from the man's wallet out the window. We gave the wallet to the police and never heard more about the incident. Years ago, Nora found a stolen purse on Hospital Hill -- the site of the old Sacred Heart hospital in east Medford. A $10 bill was concealed inside, and there were also gas receipts which told us where to return the purse. There's also the flotsam and jetsam of city life, such as the license plate we recently found in the street. The plate was still current, so I took it to the Medford police department, and they said they would return it to the owner. Then there are the mail thefts. Nora is much more observant than I am. She was the first to notice mail stuck into evergreen bushes in front of houses on Siskiyou. We retrieved several pieces of junk mail: things like pitches to sign up for credit cards, or coupon books from grocery stores. Then we found a letter to a utility company which was accompanied by a check for $300. The date on the check was about six weeks old when we found it. Whoever stole it must have decided against altering it, and it had probably been hidden in the bushes for several weeks when we found it. We walked to the address on the check and knocked. The man who came to the door was shocked to find his mail had been rifled. He lived along one of those sections of Siskiyou Boulevard where residents have long been required to put old-fashioned rural mail boxes on posts at curb-side, rather than mount small ones their front doors. I suspect these folks had those rural mailboxes years ago, before that neighborhood became part of the city. Apparently no one has ever changed the arrangement. We never know what we're going to find next. A week or so ago, we noticed a small brown-paper bag in a front yard on Groveland Avenue. Inside the bag we found a soggy sandwich and a small bag of chips. The next day, we noticed there were other brown-paper sacks, too. A sandwich from one of the bags was out in the street -- no telling who or what put it there. An apple peeked out of another bag. We have a theory that the paper sacks are left by kids who don't like the school lunches they bring from home. Mothers who live around Groveland send their kids off to school with paper-sack lunches might want to ask the kids whether they're eating their lunch. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA