Once again, an item I read in my newspaper sent me down to the basement and up to the attic and even out into my own personal rural garbage midden.

You may have seen the same story: a family in England was cleaning out a house, when they found what seemed to be an antique porcelain vase, possibly valuable. As it turned out, someone bought it at auction for $84 million.

That’s the kind of money I could use.

Over the years, I have been lucky enough to live in old houses with dank basements and dusty attics and, sometimes, crawl spaces under the eaves. Several have even come with garbage dumps on the back 40. Always alert to the possibility of hidden treasure, I have searched them carefully and frequently. Usually without luck but sometimes with promise.

Years ago, I found a mammoth china platter in my mother’s fruit cellar. It appeared to have been there for years, if dust was an indicator. So, one night, I slipped it out of the house and cleaned it up. It didn’t say “Product of the Ming Dynasty” on the bottom, but it was big enough to be worth something. Alas, as I was planning how to market it, a small child nudged it off the table and it broke in three. Discouraging.

A few years after that, I thought I may have struck it rich one day when I was inspecting the eaves of a house we had just bought. I shone a light down the crawl space, revealing a tin chest about the size of a microwave oven tucked in with some pipes. I sent a child in because she was smaller than me, and she tugged it out — a dusty box, locked and obviously hidden away. And that spelled “treasure.”

It wasn’t too heavy but it did rattle when I shook it.

I took it downstairs and smashed the lock with a hammer, for I was in a hurry. Out came three nickels, a deck of cards, a cigarette lighter and a booklet that was entitled (I think) The Rules of Procedure for the Mystical Order of the Eastern Star.

This last item turned out not to be a valuable plan for world domination, but rather a booklet for conducting meetings of what I assume was a woman’s club. (Or, perhaps, given the 1930s date of the booklet, a ladies’ club.)

Disappointed I was, but I didn’t give up. I am always happy to visit an attic or basement or dump. What I mostly have found are liquor bottles, spice bottles and blue bottles for stomach remedies. Had I taken them to a dealer, I might well have made $15 or $20.

My current house has a crawl space in the basement. When my wife went in there (she’s thinner than I am), she found an old bottle that easily could be worth $1 and several pop bottles that were a good 10 years old. This house also comes with eaves that you can enter by prying a panel off the wall. I looked in one and found a square bale of hay. Not, I suspect, a hidden cow treat, but rather something to absorb drips from the roof. I nailed the panel back into place.

The closest I ever came to an ancient vase worth a small fortune was the time I broke one. When I was a small child, my mother displayed a pair of light blue vases speckled with silver stars on a shelf in the living room. She warned us children to be careful around them because they were valuable. But surely she should have known better.

One day, when I was throwing sofa cushions at my younger sister, I broke a vase. My mother was extremely angry. And the next day, the remaining vase vanished when my mother made a trip downtown.

Two days later, she bought a mink coat. The vase never reappeared. I have always thought there must have been some connection.

And, by the way, if you go down into your basement or up into your attic and find a delicate blue vase speckled with silver stars, kindly remember that, by rights, it should be mine.

Thank you in advance. IE