stoned

One of the mysteries about the back yard of our house in Eldorado is why the previous owner tied a couple of stones (with holes bored through them) to strings, and then suspended them from one of the trees. Since he worked for BNSF - the railroad company - down in Albuquerque, it seems unlikely that this was some kind of flowering of experimental art, especially as there was no other hint of aesthetic adventure anywhere else in the house. He was a keen gardener: could they have operated as some kind of bird scarer? I can think of more effective ones (it nearly being spring time, various neighborhood houses are starting to sprout tufts of silver foil on their branches, to keep the finches away from the fruit blossoms).

The builders who put up the portale and the wall in the fall removed the branch from which one of the stones hung, but the other one has been tied up out of their way, and is now poised like a large baked potato, waiting for me to fetch some steps and release it. Perhaps, once the clocks have sprung forward in the morning, I could measure its shadow on the ground, and use it as some kind of sundial?