The little waste can didn't cost much. It was too small to use as a real trash can. It got tossed around a lot, sometimes upended on the head of an unsuspecting sibling.

It gathered dings and dents over the years.

Faith Vittori doesn’t remember why she bought it at a local five and dime in Woodstown, N.J. in the early 1970s.

“It might have been for the idyllic scene wrapped around it,” she said. She does remember noticing it from time to time and using it for different things, like holding wrapping paper and various other items over the years.

She doesn't know why she kept it around for 38 years. She admitted to being something of a hoarder. She said she sometimes just found it easier to keep moving things from place to place rather than get rid of them.

It was pretty beat up by the time she and her husband, Joel, moved to Mannington Township, N.J., but she couldn't bring herself to throw it away. She put it in an upstairs room and forgot about it.

In 1994, the Vittoris were visiting friends in the Boothbay area. During a drive through East Boothbay, Joel Vittori spotted an old Mercedes for sale in a driveway. He knocked on the door. A woman answered and asked if he was interested in the car, or the house. “The house is for sale?” he said.

She told him the owner was away but if he'd like to contact her she'd give him a number to call.

They called, came back in November to look at it and fell in love with it. A few months later they owned it.

The Vittoris have been dividing their time between their homes in New Jersey and Maine for 19 years. During their time in East Boothbay, they became friendly with their neighbor, Ernestine Dodge. They loved spending time with her and hearing stories about the place where she had lived since 1951.

The East Boothbay Methodist Church was right across the street from Dodge's and the Vittori's houses. Dodge was a soloist and played the piano there for 58 years, right up until the time of her death in 2009, at the age of 100.

Faith Vittori was putting away Christmas decorations in her New Jersey home last January. Using the little old waste can to hold some of them had become habit.

“I picked it up and for some reason really looked at the photograph that was etched into it,” she said. The scene was of the backs of a couple houses with a body of water in the foreground and a white church steeple in the background. “It was a nice steeple,” she said. “Just like the one on the East Boothbay Methodist Church.”

Behind one of the houses was a winding white fence and a grazing horse. Something clicked. “Ernestine had told me there used to be a corral behind her house where her husband kept a horse.”

“I looked closer and went, 'Oh my God. This is our house!’”

She took it downstairs and showed it to her husband. “Look at this, Joel,” she said. “Do you think this could be our house?”

It was. The water was the Mill Pond, the steeple was the one on the East Boothbay Methodist Church, and the backs of the houses were those of Ernestine Dodge and the Vittoris.

Serendipity or just plain old coincidence?

You decide.