A mystery for my livejournal friends
So Corri and I own this house now, right? And when you own a house, you apparently have to do all of this wacky maintenance stuff so that your walls don't collapse and your sinks don't spout out rusty water and you don't get boll weevils nesting in your air ducts and who knows what else. One of these things (which home inspectors and contractors are happy to point out - especially if they or someone they know can do the job for you - though no two will agree on the severity or necessity of a given task) is that if you have a wooden floor on your porch, you need ventilation underneath, lest moisture build up down there from generally wet ground, be unable to escape, and rot or warp the boards. I don't know how the ground gets wet with a porch over it in the first place, but I'm willing to go along.

The common solution is latticework, hence why you see so many suburban porches with it on the front and/or side. I'm guessing that half of you find this to be common knowledge, while the other half, like me until recently, never noticed it. If you had, you may have, again like me, just assumed it was a design choice particular to the suburbs. Regardless, I had no lattice - just a big board nailed on to the side of the porch. The project for last Saturday was to get that ventilation going, so a few friends and I went to town on the thing with various prying implements. I was pretty aware that I hadn't been able to see under the porch at all, and that there could really be anything under there. I don't know what I was ultimately expecting, but I know it wasn't what I found:

Sticks.

A pile About six feet wide, by two feet high, by ten or twelve feet long - the length of most of the front of my house - all sticks. And trash strewn in, of course, but that goes without saying. Aged bottles with soda logos so old that they call up associated memories from childhood. Assorted bits of glass and plastic, the latter seemingly from toys. Perhaps most helpfully, a newspaper or two, dating at least the front of the mess back to 1987. But I don't want to talk about the trash; I want to talk about the sticks.

These are long pieces of wood, some only a foot long, some up to five or six feet, but there is not a single piece of wood in there that I would categorize as a branch or a twig. My point being that there's no way this was a firewood pile, and its just way too big to be a kindling pile. I'm pretty sure it also was not simply a yard debris dump or there should have been some smaller ones in there too. If I remove them by myself (which, because of the small space and weird positioning of the door, is really the only way to do it), this is a multiple-day, possibly multiple-week job. I don't know how else to describe just how many of them there are. They are also mostly laid out in the same direction. The size and orientation of the pile, the near uniformity of the stick sizes - all of this says to me that it was deliberate.

Either the pile existed before the porch was built (but then why leave it there?) or it was assembled underneath by bringing in way more sticks than anyone would have in their yard (but bringing them in through a small side opening). Neither of these options satisfies me.

So maybe you know about things like this; maybe it's for drainage or to keep animals from burrowing in the dirt under the porch. Or maybe you just like speculating and you'll at least come up with a plausible scenario in which a prior homeowner would do something like this. I'd like to use the space for storage, and at this point, if I have to remove them, I'd seriously consider setting them on fire and taking my chances with the porch. Please, put my mind at ease; tell me why there are so many sticks under my porch.