What is it?

yard sale reached Cheyenne County, dangling in the NW corner where Colorado and Nebraska meet, we haven’t heard about it.

Fingering 1920’s monkey wrenches going for a couple of bucks, or plain hand tools that might not go at all, it is a wonder there is anything left. There is a lot of stuff left out here, the residue of long-gone farms. The family that could draw enough out of deep black soil from forty or a hundred sixty acres is a memory. A decade ago roads were dotted with abandoned farmsteads, hundreds of them. The houses are even gone.

Here, as everywhere else, the economy is in size; you have to farm a lot of land to enjoy the economy of scale. Their stuff had to go somewhere and right now everything from singlerow plows, spoke shaves, draw knives, peavies, harnesses, wash boards, cookware, cream separators, churns and crocks to “single trees” are in the “Treasure Hunt.”

There is sadness in some of this loot. I lifted the edge of a wooden box and found old family pictures. From clothing and photograph type I judge the images span the late 1800s through the 1920s.

Lined up, as if watching time pass, I saw two girls, sisters, in sailor inspired Victorian dresses to the straight line of the 1920s. There were no names on the prints, not one. Somewhere those girls’ DNA runs through the veins of a guy driving a giant tractor with a grain head on it wider than a highway. His ancestor’s horse pulled a plow called a “grasshopper.” It cut strips of sod a foot wide and four inches deep and from those strips of earth, bound by grass roots, a sod house; a “soddie” was built, by laying up the sod strips.

When the personal tools of work and life are disbursed I wonder what will be left out here. The implement a man used to provide for his family will wind up as a curiosity on somebody’s wall. There doesn’t seem to be any sense in that, nor in a box of pictures without names.

Joe Phillips writes his “Dear me” columns for several small newspapers. He has many connections to Walker County, including his grandfather, former superintendent Waymond Morgan. He can be reached at joenphillips@ hotmail.com.