Buckets of Rust

I ended up with the task of emptying my father’s tool shop. I was assisted by Hubby and a brother and his wife. The guys went through the tools and recognized most. “Look, a chamber reamer for a diesel engine!” “Hey, a railroad gandy’s bar.” They rejected almost all the items and divvied up the rest. Now we were left with a lot of trash and plenty of junk. The suggestion was made to take the metal items to be recycled. Everyone left me with the job of sorting. I picked out the brass and aluminum from the iron with the result of heavy buckets of nails, staples, bolts, tools, engine thingies and unidentified parts. The recycle place was in the next town so Hubby took pity on me and loaded the stuff in the pickup. Pacific Recycling took the bucket of brass and the bucket of aluminum and sent us around back with the buckets of iron. There we saw a construction crane the size of a brontosaurus. It had an electro magnet big as a Volkswagen that was picking up scrap iron out of the back of a truck. A rusty colored guy took our buckets of bolts and sent us around to the office to be paid. We had to wait in line with some of unwashed hippie-types who had also brought in their aluminum cans. The bottom line was 380 lbs. of scrap iron, 12 lbs. of brass and 3 lbs. of aluminum. We were handed $20.80 for our efforts. That was just enough to pay for two combo meals and fifty miles worth of gasoline. The experience was the freebie.