Did you ever see the movie The Goonies? Goonies tells the story of several misfit kids who are convinced a pirate, named One-Eyed Willie, buried a treasure near their town decades before. The movie details their adventures as they strive to prove themselves to a town who laughingly disbelieves the stories, and a gang of crooks who know that they are on to something.

And in the end, they find the pirate ship, complete with treasure, and even One-Eyed Willie himself.

I enjoy movies that tell the story of someone finding a treasure worth millions. What a happy ending.

You may know that I enjoy the hobby of numismatics, coin collecting.

After we moved from Branson West to Mountain View a couple of weeks ago, we needed to go back to clean up the house and make sure it was ready to be shown to potential buyers.

As we were cleaning, I decided that I had better check the tops of all the cabinets to make sure we hadn’t missed packing anything. The tops of the cabinets had a little ridge along the top, so things could have been up there and out of sight.

So I grabbed the step-stool and went to work. I checked the cabinets in the bathrooms. And I found little more that dust, and the container that holds the pads for my massage mouse. Oops… Can’t leave that behind.

So I went to the kitchen to check on top of those cabinets, not expecting to find much there either.

On top of the first cabinet I looked, I found a box full of old coins! It was a plastic container, the kind with adjustable compartments, like you can find at Wal-Mart, near the tackle boxes, or in the craft section. And it had dozens of old American and Canadian coins in it.

It was on top of the cabinet, and a piece of plywood was over it, resting on the ridged edge of the cabinet. We had even used the plywood to display some of Heather’s decorations in the kitchen. The board held the decorations, in this case,a brass tea kettle, up high enough to be seen easily.

We had lived there for four years and never had the slightest idea that it was there! It had belonged to the previous owner, and even had her hand-written notes, detailing what coins were there and what she thought of them.

I was ecstatic. After getting it back home and looking through it, I discovered that it wasn’t a very valuable collection, nothing like One-Eyed Willie’s treasure. But it had a few 1964 Kennedy half dollars, and a few from later in the 60s as well. And I found several silver Jefferson war nickels from the 1940s. And there were a lot of other various quarters, dimes, nickels and cents as well.

While it wasn’t a valuable find, the excitement of finding a treasure under (or over, in this case) our very noses was incredibly fun.

Now I take those buried treasure stories a little more seriously…