We’re big fans of Weird Al at my house and he’s got a classic song about the biggest ball of Twine in Minnesota. Way back when I first met my wife, well, then proto-wife or what have you, she didn’t know it the twine ball really existed. So I told her about my encounter with it. Today, I’m telling you. But before we begin, here’s the song from Al.
Back when I was a teen, my buddy Sam and I took a trip out to Nebraska to see his grandparents. On the way back, we hauled an empty hay trailer for Sam’s folks. We passed through a lot of places, including a little town called Darwin. They had a sign up about some roadside attraction. You can guess which one. I forget which one of us had the idea to pull in and check it out, but soon we were there. At 3AM in the morning.
The moon lit the world and we could see it just fine, sitting on the side of the highway, but we’d pulled over and taken a closer look. It was big, but a farmer hand-rolled it and thus it was still small enough for the pair of us to roll it if we had the gumption to do so. I’m not sure whose idea it was to tip the trailer up off the hitch so we could roll it up there, but dang, it was hard to push it up the makeshift ramp.
Once we got the ball up yay far, the weight counterbalance and the trailer came crashing back down onto all four wheels. It might have been loud, lights came up in the farm house up the driveway. We hitched the trailer back up to the truck and slowly drove off down the road a spell to get out of sight.
We then had a new pickle. Four more counties to drive through and this big ball that wasn’t actually fastened down on a flat-bed trailer. Since it was a good idea, I’m pretty sure it was me who suggested we use the twine from the ball to lash it down. That worked out and we made it back to our town without losing the load, at the cost of a smaller biggest ball of twine.
To finish our prank, we dropped it off in a friend of the family’s milk barn. Just rolled it off the back, figuring he’d find it when he went to milk the cows and wonder how it got there. The ball seemed smaller than when we started by this point. But it was still something to see.
Now I don’t know if my wife believed in the twine ball or not, but I can say that they put it the town park in a gazebo. Stopping any more nonsense like that.