Thursday, October 3, 2019

 
I came across this great quote by W B Yeats...

"The matrix of innovation is a junkyard."


As a young girl growing up in a junk yard, my dad gave me and my three siblings jobs... picking copper out of wrecked cars or any other junk in the yard that contained copper wiring. 
It was like mining for gold. At an early age I new the deference between copper, brass, tin, steel and aluminium. The wires were often coated in a plastic casing, which would have to be removed before my dad could sell the metal, so, he would just burn it off! Cough cough… not environmentally friendly!
 Another job we had was to collect the smaller pieces of metal and separate them into different piles, then through them into lugger boxes ( a large steel container)  
As the cars accumulated over the years, the yard got so full of junk my dad would 
hire a crane service to  come into the yard, to load all the car carcasses onto a flatbed long truck.  
That and all the other junk would be taken to a bigger scrap metal dealer in Hamilton, 
to be crushed into cubes and recycled…This repeated itself about every five years. 
We had the best playground anyone could ask for.  

This was the front yard view of the house we lived in, that little white house,
was our first home we lived in when we were very small. It was used as a storage space at the time this picture was taken. 
In the foreground is my father chopping wood and me and my brother with our dog.
The photo above this was the side view of the yard. Just to give you 
a sense of scale. Behind that big shed was a skating rink, shown in the picture below.



I'm the one siting in the back seat of our car made out of junk.
 Very innovative I'd say! 

No comments:

Post a Comment