The Last Laugh: One Man's Junk

With the present mania for recycling, "getting rid of may soon be an idiom gone from the language. Certainly getting rid of anything down on the farm these days is next to impossible.

February/March 1992
By Patricia Penton Leimbach 
130-096-01
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ILLUSTRATION ? DARYLL COLLINS
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With the present mania for recycling, "getting rid of may soon be an idiom gone from the language. Certainly getting rid of anything down on the farm these days is next to impossible.

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For years now Paul has been wanting to burn the kettle house—a little vine-covered shack in the backyard containing a great kettle built into a brick fire pot once used for rendering lard and making apple butter.

"Don't you dare touch that!" I say. "It's a period piece—irreplaceable!" And besides, I need it. It's crammed with old newspapers and pop bottles and flower pots and push lawn mowers and dozens of other things awaiting recycling.

Forty feet south of the kettle house is the ice house, crowded with antique tools and household implements and great-great-grandfather Leimbach's gilt-framed portrait. The seed house, 40 feet to the north, stores a wealth of old doors and windows and lumber and porch swings and butter churns and discarded appliances "somebody might need sometime."

The horse barn, in addition to motorcycles and bicycles, shelters old harnesses and horse collars and wagon wheels.

That's just the beginning. There's also the granary, the chicken coop, the hay barn, and the "big barn"; then there's Newberry's barn (when you buy a neighbor's farm his fields and buildings traditionally carry his name ad infinitum);

Newberry's milk house, and Newberry's toolshed. And every weathered building has its cache of farm treasures.

For 100 years the Leimbachs have prevailed on this site—enlarging, expanding, acquiring, with neither a sale nor a fire. The accumulation is overwhelming.

Every time I get ready to do a good cleaning job, some yahoo comes around blabbing, "don't throw THAT away! They're paying fabulous prices for that stuff." Where, I ask, are all these people paying "fabulous prices" for barn siding, mason jars, old bottles, rusty nails, wavy windowpanes, hand-hewn beams, and—are you ready for this one!—worn and faded blue denim?

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