Missing Boxes

Recently, it's been doing a lot of raining! In Houston the rain will come down too quickly for the storm sewers to handle. The result=street flooding. This is my washed-out corner one recent rainy afternoon. Usually, there's a sidewalk and a road here. Luckily, within 30 minutes, the flood was gone.

I have had some truly lonely boxes. For the longest time, there was just a small group of us placing and finding boxes in the greater Houston area. Once Silver Eagle, Baby Bear, Birds of a Feather, TeamKing, and Mother of Five had found your box, that was pretty much all the finders it was going to have. Sure, Gryzzled Gryphon would swoop in, and a lot of the boxes would sometimes have an occasional out-of-town visitor (or school would let out and Runs for Chocolate would go on a tear). There were others who letterboxed periodically or would become active for a short spate of time and then fade away. However, for the most part, that was our small, but merry group. And letterboxes would sit for months at a time without finders.

That’s why I never worried about replacing missing boxes. Almost all the finders who were going to find the box had already found it. So, instead of replacing old boxes, I would concentrate my efforts on creating and hiding new ones so that our little band would have new quarry to hunt.

Along the way, I discovered that Mother of Five shares my love of puzzle boxes and that Silver Eagle, although not that enthusiastic, will definitely solve them & go find the box. So I did a lot of planting for this audience. Sometimes it was just two or three people finding a box…and that was really okay, because the finders really loved and appreciated those boxes that they had to work so hard to find.

HINT: If you’re reading this, maybe you’d like to know that Celestial Elemental is in the general Pasadena/Clear Lake area…so that this box can be found by someone other than the one lonely finder over the last year.

And now, all of a sudden…over the last six months, we have a slew of new boxers around our greater metro area. I am getting regular find reports on a lot of boxes and that has me wondering, should I replace some of the oldies? A lot of them had very clever clues or were I think, just fun one way or another. They weren't all hard (some were), but each one had a unique twist. Mainly, to solve them required an AHA moment!

Most of the new finders haven’t developed a thirst for the puzzlers (yet, I hope). Even though most of my puzzle boxes are still sitting lonely and unfound, I hold out the hope that someone will start solving them (and those are my best carves, usually). If I did see an interest, I think I might start replacing some of the oldies but goodies instead of just planting new ones.

Below: more fun mushrooms in a tree. That ominous grey sky? Sure enough it led very shortly to a torrential downpour, meaning we had to cut short Sunday's letterboxing outing.