Recycling center/scrap yard

Working in a recycling center/scrap yard, has allowed me a rare view into the lives of our discarded house hold items.  Each day people drive in across the scales, with hidden treasures.  It is not odd to pull a perfectly fine cast iron skillet, or pot out of pile.  Not uncommon to see hundreds of lovely pieces of designer brass each week from people’s homes, nor is it even remotely odd to find tools and other useful, useable objects from the past and the present.  As I sit writing this I stare out on the lot, full of old horse drawn implements, ghosts of a long distant past.  A working wringer washing sits quite now.  A claw foot tub waits for its next home sitting among the broken waited parts and pieces of the modern world.   

It is amazing the amount of waste we create and how little we reuse, perhaps if we thought before tossing the world would be a calmer place, but what I have learned by being here is the opposite of this, we are all in a race of more and more stuff, newer stuff, etc.  There is no winner to this race, and the people who come and return these items to their former glory, and they are far and few.  Most people who pick our yard are doing just that, picking and selling old stuff to the highest bidder, most of the items have long since lost the use they were intended for and now sit upon a shelf to be looked upon with wonder and awe.  How will the next generation know who we are, by our trash of course and what they will learn is that we were never happy and never content, that color motivated us more than function and how we made our lives busy with stuff. 

Another day in paradise, today I will attend a cleanup at Ozarka College.  I am very excited to see what sorts of data I can extrapolate from this experience.  What I expect to see is an overly large proportion or drink containers compared to the other trash.  I base this on social stigma of eating and walking verses drinking and walking, which seems quite common.  I will go as far to hypotheses that I will find more fast food wrappers, than chip bags for the same reason.  I am fascinated by the fact that a person will walk around eating a burger, but will not eat chips.  I will post my finding here within the next few days.

Be Blessed and thank you for showing an interest in my work.

Shekhinah

Archaeology is a lot more than just studying the past, it is about studying the recent past and the just past.  This Friday I will attend a clean up at Ozarka college, I plan to document my finds and try to formulate a picture of the type of people I might find there, as well as why they discard there trash the way they do.  It is simple laziness or is it something more...return here in a few days to find out.

Shekhinah

In the small town of Moko in north central Arkansas stands the sad lonely skeletal remains of what was once a thriving store in 1909. One can only stand in awe of the wonderful treasures lying with in this site. Imagine that over a hundred years of living history will stand around us and beneath our very feet just waiting to tell us it’s many stories.

We hope to use this blog to document with words and photos and what ever we can to share this experience with all of you nice people out there.

This all started because we drove by these old broken down buildings sitting on a corner just inside the small town of Moko across from the Moko Flea Market slash book store. We did this a few times a month for many months always talking about how really great is would be to be able to tear down old buildings for the lumber and reuse the lumber and other pieces to rebuild our barn and some other buildings that we have. This time it was different we stopped over at the
Flea Market and bought some wood for our wood burner, it gets a bit nippy in Arkansas this time of year. While we were there we started talking to the man and asked him if he knew he who the owner of the property (the old builds-aka the 1909 store) across from his was. He said yeah Jerry was a neighbor of his. I thought how great….! I asked him to please give Jerry my card and have him call me if he needs some one to take the buildings down. Latter that day to my shock and amazement Jerry did call. He explained that this was him mothers property and how she was 87 and had been blind for the last ten years, so she had no idea of how bad the property looked and such. He told me how people who had moved from Florida ( I lived in Florida last year…she says rolling her eyes) hated the look of the place and had been complaining. The state he said had offer to clear the land in exchange for a small section of it which it would use to bring the road out a bit. Jerry sad this was sure to take a long time as Little Rock was now involved and as long as we were willing to sign a form saying that we would not hold him liable if we got hurt than we could tear it down and take it all away. We arranged to meet him the next day to sign the form. We meet outside the Salem Court House, near the some day water fountain and signed the form and talked for a while about the property and his mom and there family and the fact that the site was noted for being a Civil War site as well. I was delighted to hear so many really wonderful things. He had also told us about the last people who were the first ones to attempt tearing these buildings down and about them finding a photo of a man that they had turned over to Jerry. It turned out to be his Mothers Dad, His Grand Father who was an outlaw and one day just vanished (sure hope we don’t dig him up under a floor board or something). So we listened to all that was said, learned a lot, and planned our conquest.


So here we are using the past to create a future. This is the greatest form of recycling and it saves what would be a other wise lost past. Unlike most people who would come in and tear it down with out thought, we will do our very best to document our findings as well as research the site. We hope to be able to piece together a history of this store, the people who owned and run it and so much really great life history.