It’s much smaller now, and that makes me feel a little validated and a little sad. Such a whimsical thing, to be so useful.
My neighbor J is the sort of person who just can’t stand piles of stuff lying around. When running a homestead, however, piles of stuff are pretty much inevitable. Periodically he actually pays me to haul them away. I dutifully do so, but I don’t haul them far. Piles of stuff are a major part of my livelihood, and not because I’m paid money to take them away.
A small digression, if you don’t mind. I just started reading this book a neighbor gave me called “The Good Life Lab.” It’s basically a pretentious and artsy version of what I’ve been doing for a long time, and I got a kick out of something the author said in the early going about ‘living in the waste stream’…”Living in the waste stream feels to me like paying homage to materials already taken and energy already spent.” Yeah, whatever, I call it ‘scrounging to save a buck, when I couldn’t get to a store even if I had the buck.’ Digression ends.
In one such pile was a ball of bailing twine. Either J or H, in their neverending quest to keep piles of cut twine from accumulating while they fed their horses, had wound each new one onto this ball until the ball became too awkwardly big. They never seem to have had any notion of re-use, it was just trash management. So I tossed it into the Jeep trailer, and I hauled it away.
Truth, I didn’t really have any use for it either at the time. But I never really doubted that uses would present themselves, because you never stop needing string. And in that way, my ball of twine gradually began to diminish.
Today it took a serious hit. But I was rather proud of the result.
Yeah, I need to get a better camera. 🙂
There were entire farms around these parts, where the only inputs were a collie dog, a stick and lots and lots of baler twine to hold everything else together.
A nail was useful too – to put holes into the snapped horse harness so you could thread some baler twine through.
come to think of it, in my childhood, it was still referred to a s “binder twine”
Speaking of better cameras, just what is it we’re supposed to be looking at? Pitcher no embiggenating.
Yeah, sorry. It didn’t come out well anyway. I was just trying to show my cool woven chickenyard roof.
Oh yeah, I saved all my baling twine, and used it a lot. Long braided pieces are a decent rope substitute, the stuff is pretty strong and durable. We save tons of stuff here too, scrap wood, hardware, coffee cans…. a lot of stuff can be re-used if you’re creative.