Duct tape and bailing wire
In the above photo, friends is the “reel†thing—bailing wire, right next to the duct tape. No, I didn’t get it off a reel. It came out of the old family barn, a barn that is about to be bulldozed down, along with the old family farm house—gone forever.Â
There’s still a big pile of that wire in the barn, but it’s not accessible without taking out a wall. Not that you’d really want to, anyway, but that wire is anywhere from forty to ninety years old, and you just don’t see it around much anymore.
Yes, we had to sell the old farm. There was no one to live there and keep it up, and it wasn’t in a particularly safe area. Oh, it was at one time, back in the days when Dad took his rifle to school with him and stored it in the cloak room until time to go home, and no one ever got shot—not once. He and his brother used it to hunt possum on the way home.
In a month or two, there will be nothing left but a memory. I hate that it has to happen, but life goes on. One thing I really regret, though, is that the old house has window panes that date back about 100 years. That glass is wavy, not flat like modern glass, and it can’t be replaced except by windows in another 100-year-old farm house.
There’s a lot of history in that old farm and the surrounding area.   A spur of the Chisholm Trail even passed nearby.  I’ve recorded some of the history and family stories, and maybe I’ll get to publish it some day. I hope I got everything correct, because there’s no one left alive to correct me. I’ll miss the old farm, but I miss the family the most.
