The long, dirt road wound its lazy way through acres of shady woods, stopping to rest right in the middle of a small clearing filled with gardens of vegetables being prematurely roasted by the hungry sun.  In this clearing there sat a cozy old house. There was nothing particularly special about this house; the porch needed a coat of paint and the floors creaked. There were ants in the kitchen, and the upstairs sink had an incorrigible habit of dripping water onto the tiled floor. Even the people who lived in the house were ordinary. There were five of them, three children and their parents, and together they were the Johnston family.

The youngest of the children was Lavender. The family had adopted her less than a year ago. She had curly black hair, brown eyes, and a tendency toward disobedience. Next came Tim. He liked to draw, and was very good at it. You could usually find him bent over some artwork or another, brows furrowed and bright green eyes fixed on his latest creation. Finally, there was Kitty.

Kitty was the oldest by four years, and she liked nothing better than to explore. In fact, that was what she was doing right now.

Kitty was in her basement, sorting through heaps of disintegrating old boxes and crates. She was wearing work gloves to protect against the unexpected broken glass or nest of perturbed mice, and so she had blindly thrust her arm elbow-deep into an old wooden crate. She felt about with experienced fingers, finally closing her fist around a heavy metal object. She withdrew her arm, and held the object up to the unwilling light of the basement's sparse fixtures. The object was shaped like a leaf, and so tarnished that it took a trained eye to see the silver gleam beneath all the grime. Kitty carried it over to her workstation, where she pulled out a polishing cloth and spent a few minutes industriously rubbing at  a corner of the leaf. Once she had it reasonably clean, she pulled an unglazed pottery strip from her copious pocket, and drew it carefully against the leaf. The mark came away black. Kitty was ecstatic!

"I've really struck gold today," she said out loud, "or rather, silver!" She could sell this leaf for a good few hundred dollars once she got it cleaned up. Or maybe she would keep it, and add it to her collection of bits and bobs that had caught her fancy over the years. She had a shelf in her otherwise uncluttered room devoted to them, some valuable, others just interesting to look at. She would figure out what to do with it later, she decided. Right now, it was time to hunt for treasure!

Kitty returned to the crate she had found the leaf in, and began to search, this time with much more enthusiasm. She uncovered a broken sun catcher, shards of an old amber bottle, and some creepy old gnomes she wished she had left buried. Finally, her fingers closed around metal. Kitty drew a second silver leaf from the box, and examined it closely. This one wasn't as badly corroded as the other one, and she could make out ornate designs lacing the dully glinting surface. Before she could look too closely, however, a muffled voice drew her back to reality.

     "Kitty! Mom says to come up for lunch!" Tim's voice filtered down the stairs and through the maze of boxes. Kitty sighed, and dropped the second leaf off at her workstation before thumping up the stairs to the kitchen.