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The podcast about everyday stuff that turns out to be older, weirder, and way more meaningful than we realized.
00:00 Introduction
You’re walking through your neighborhood, enjoying the weather and the exercise. You notice that one of your neighbors chopped down their tree. That old pine left a stump about three feet high. And on top of that stump sits a bird bath. You listen to the birds for a moment and walk on.
Next house, and you see another stump. They’ve carved this one into an effigy of the high school mascot. On to the next house, where you notice they use rusty, hundred-year-old farm equipment to separate the boundary of their yard.
And then another house has a beautiful wisteria growing out of the bowl of an old toilet.
All of them have old things that have become new decorations. Why?
It’s probably a folk thing.
[music]
Welcome to It’s Probably a Folk Thing, the podcast about everyday experiences that turn out to be older, weirder, and far more meaningful than we realized. I’m your host, Aaron Crawford, and today we’re talking about using discarded objects as yard art.
01:13 Segment 1: The Stump and the Birdbath
Let's start with that first stump.
The tree is gone. The majestic pine that used to stretch to the heavens is now a wooden corpse. Shouldn’t that go, too? Shouldn’t they ground it down, fill it in, and move on? But no - this homeowner didn't. They kept it. And they didn’t just keep it: They topped it with a birdbath of all things.
There's something deliberate happening here, even if the homeowner never thought of it in these terms. The stump is natural. The birdbath is human-made. The birds are natural again. It's a small, careful arrangement that says: I want to fit here. I want to belong to this landscape, not just occupy it.
The homeowner is taking part in an ancient impulse to reach toward nature, to ask to be included in earth’s story. It’s appeared in every culture that has ever placed a stone, planted a tree, or built a shrine at the edge of a field.
It’s the human trying to say, “I’m part of something larger than myself.”
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02:23 Segment 2: The Carved Mascot
The next stump is doing something different.
It uses the same raw material. But this one has been transformed by a skilled artist, by an artisan who uses a chainsaw like Raphael used a paintbrush. And that high school mascot wasn't abstract. It’s a symbol of the local community.
This is yard art as identity statement. The maker isn't just saying I belong to this land. They're saying I belong to a group, to this neighborhood, to this community. The neighbors who pass it know exactly what it means. The ones who went to that school feel it. The ones who didn't still understand the gesture.
This is how yard art transmits. You don't instruct anyone. You display. And someone down the street sees it, feels something, and finds their own stump.
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03:15 Segment 3: The Farm Equipment
Now we get to the rusted farm equipment at the yard's edge.
No transformation here. That's the point. The equipment isn't decorative in the conventional sense. It isn't pretty and it isn't whimsical. It's heavy and old and it looks like work. Because it was work.
Displaying it unchanged is an act of memory. It says: This land was labored over. Someone bent their back here. The people who farmed with that equipment are probably passed on and buried. But the story of working the land doesn't get buried with the people who lived it.
What you’re seeing is material culture: The objects a community keeps, displays, and passes down. Folklorists see material culture as a form of storytelling. This rusty equipment is a sentence. It reads: We were here, and it was hard, and we want you to know.
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04:08 Segment 4: The Toilet
And then there's the toilet.
Full of wisteria. Beautiful, actually. And also, undeniably, a toilet.
A toilet isn't just a discarded object: It's an intimate one. The homeowner who plants flowers in it and sets it in the front yard is making a specific argument, even if they'd never put it this way.
Even the part of me that gets discarded becomes part of this space.
Mentally healthy humans don't mark territory the way animals do. But this is almost a rhyme with that instinct. It says: This is where I lived. This is where I was human. And that makes me a part of the story of this place, too.
The toilet is the thesis of the whole walk, stated plainly. Nothing gets thrown away. Nothing gets erased. It all stays, in one form or another, rooted and tied to the land and community.
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05:10 Closing
And that’s what that whole walk was really about.
The stump. The mascot. The equipment. The toilet. Four different objects, four different gestures, one argument underneath all of them: I belong to this place, and this place belongs to me. I am part of a story that stretches backward and forward for millennia.
These objects should have disappeared. The tree got cut down. The equipment stopped working. The toilet got replaced. Impermanence was the plan.
But the yard artist refuses impermanence. They take what was used up and make it visible. They plant something in it, carve something from it, let it rust beautifully at the property line. They say, with every piece: This land forgets nothing, because I won't let it.
That's not just decorating. That's an act of belonging.
It's definitely a folk thing.
Until Next Time.