Bagpipe Shadow Puppet

One thing the farm has is space; the farmer can easily store things she has no use for in a loft of attic or in a currently unused chicken coop, as the demand for eggs has been met by other local sources. Like facts and uninterpreted memories stored in the human preconscious, those things are there and available for when need or fancy meet human ingenuity at the crossroads of now, or not.
A jar of twine, bits of cloth, the Studebaker, a single-horse sleigh, an egg basket full of blown light bulbs. Random things come and it is not necessary to wonder whether there is a place to put it. It is quite possible, in the future, that such an item will meet some ultimate, ingenious use, unknown as yet. There isn’t trash pick-up; what is unwanted is dumped in the wooded ravine at the edge of the field. If you change your mind, you can go dig for it, but there’s a chance some other animal has taken a fancy to it. One time I saw an otter in the creek cradling a bottle of Evening in Paris, unscrewing the cap, sniffing, dabbing it on, winking at me, and screwing the cap back on again. Also, the beavers decorated the entry of their dam with bright yellow lawnchair tapes.
Of course there are pressing needs, getting the vegetables in before the frost, canning them before they rot, loading the wagon to be on time for market day. Feeding time. Bolting all the shutters closed with the news of a tornado.
Sometimes you might leave overnight to go to a conference on cow milking, and you grab what you thought was an old suitcase, but upon opening it, find it full of crystals and transmitters and wires and when the light hits the little solar panel, the case turns over, appendages pop out, and it scurries down the road, or stays a while, holding a digit against the base of an incandescent lightbulb, humming.
Some time in the evening when there’s plenty of kerosene, one can indulge in tinkering, sorting out the bounty of randomness and putting it into a new context, coax the meaning out of a thing, or, in some cases, figuring out what its purpose was, finally, after all this time of puzzling.
Some items had a persuasive bent, others, “un truc,” what, what, what, one wants to ask them what they are for, what do they do, what is their plastic and elastic limit, is this agent or reagent, catalytic, stable. If there isn’t too much other stuff tying you down, you have to try a thing, especially if you know you’re not supposed to stay here, see what happens, and have set aside enough to do it again, lest it’s become useful, maybe important, and the material is wasted.
Sometimes in a flash one can make a plan, an assembly, of bunches of those things, hovering between useful and useless, a repurposing to truer purpose; if there was ever a reason those things in particular were chosen to be here, and not passed along merely by the whim of another.