"Well, I went down to the Lincoln County auction, where I found something I just had to have..."

...Or something like that.  

Remember the old John Michael Montgomery song? 

That was the tune rattling around in my head as the hubs and I headed to the fall Amish auction this morning.   

We got that promised hard frost, but I couldn't help but admire the way it gilded the tattered ironweed at the edge of pastures, like old lace dusted with diamonds! 

When we arrived at the sale, the sea of vehicles looked more like Rupp Arena parking lot than a field out in the countryside, only there was a much higher ratio of pickup trucks and horse-drawn buggies than you'd be likely to find at Rupp.   

We picked up our bidding number, then strolled around eye-balling all the stuff for sale.

If you've never been to one of these sales, let me tell ya, there's a little bit of everything: Farm equipment, lawnmowers, gates for fences, hay wagons, hay rings, weed eaters, chain saws, several varieties of chickens, turkeys, ducks, quail, rabbits, commercial kitchen equipment, bags of apples, fruit, furniture, and every kind of old and new tool imaginable.  

Besides the sights, there are the sounds: roosters crowing, murmurs of conversation and the chatter of several auctions going on at once.  One group of auctioneers sells fowl and rabbits, while another sells farm machinery, and another sells smaller tools, etc. 

(Just look at these quail.  They'd be hard to spot out in the field, wouldn't they?  
One little Bantam rooster kept escaping his cage.  He was the cutest thing! But someone caught him before I took his picture.)

How's this for a quick homemade chicken coop?  Pretty clever! 

Then there are the smells of grilling hamburgers and hotdogs, smoking meat, and fried pies!  Yum!  

We rounded the corner on a small tool sale just in time to see a fellow hold up what I immediately thought looked like a walnut picker upper.  The auctioneer was earnestly trying to get 50 cents for it, and I told Robin, "I want that!"  

He whipped out our number just in time and got the contraption for a dollar. Apparently hardly anyone knew what it was. 

We carried it around for the rest of our time there, and if we were asked once, we were asked 20 times, "What is that thing?"  

Anyway, I was pretty proud of our find, because we've got lots of black walnuts around the edge of the pasture, and I'm short on patience when it comes to picking them up by hand. And besides, it's hard on the old back. 

After we got home, I walked down in the field, my prize in hand, to try it out.  

It worked amazingly well! In minutes, I had a bunch of walnuts in bags.  

Robin googled the picker-upper this evening and found one just like ours for right at a hundred dollars.  Whaaat???

No way I'd pay that much for one.  So yeah, it was worth the drive, I reckon.  Annnnd, we bought some smoked on site chicken with sides of Amish-made cowboy beans and potato salad.  

A pretty sweet haul, I'd say!