On the outskirts of Prattville, Alabama there is a massive, rusty-looking metal building called The Prattville Pickers Barn. Marion and I are drawn to such places like moths to a porch light.

We were visiting family nearby and they said to us, “Would you like to go look at a junk store?”

This is the equivalent of asking me if I’d like to have some vanilla ice cream with salted caramel and pralines on top while watching Maverick Top Gun for the 10th time with my feet propped up while getting a foot rub.

We answered in the affirmative.

The first sign that you have arrived at an authentic junk store is seen in the amount of rusty looking junk that is stacked against the front wall and scattered around the yard outside the door. This is the call-sign to the heart of a picker.

The good ones will have piles of old bed frames. Wagon wheels. Sometimes just the metal rings that went around the wheels. There’ll be white enamel tables with black trim piled up with jars and toolboxes and coffee cans of nuts and bolts. Wooden boxes of hammers. Rusty plow shares. Broken cane-back chairs.

This is not the good stuff. The good stuff is inside out of the weather. But this is the sign that they throw nothing away. They keep everything, no matter how junky.

The more junk there is, the more the heart rate increases.

When we pulled into the gravel yard, it was a bit of a let-down because the front of the barn was clean. No junk anywhere in sight. But the building itself was rusty and covered with old signs. That gave me hope.

First impressions can tell you a lot once you walk through the door. On occasions, we have taken two steps inside the front door of an “antique” or “junk” store, stopped dead in our tracks, and turned around to leave. Fru-Fru household items are not our kind of junk.

The value is in the eye of the beholder. Old chinaware, glassware, and furniture from the 1960s and 70s don’t exactly float our boat. Sometimes a vendor will try to pass off scented candles and soap under the name of antiques and gifts. Please!

We walked inside the Prattville Pickers Barn and immediately had the sensation of being transported into picker’s heaven. It was like the first time I ever walked through the tunnel between the bleachers inside a major league ballpark. Your heart jumps and you can hardly believe what your eyes are seeing.

For some reason, we always go to the right when we start the search. Maybe it’s because I go to the right at the grocery store and work the aisles up and down, right to left. Who knows?

But we have a system. You have to in order to cover a warehouse this big. Plus, we only had about an hour to look around before we had to get on the road. Speed picking was going to be essential.

I don’t know why a fella is drawn to another man’s junk. I think about this every time I haul off my junk to the landfill. Then I turn around and spend money in a place like this to buy and carry home more junk. My junk is worthless, but then I dig through other people’s junk to find treasures.

In spite of the fact that this barn was full of great stuff, I didn’t really see anything that spoke to me. The challenge is that I never know what I’m looking for. I guess that’s the allurement of looking.

I won’t know what I might find until I find it. And once I find it, whatever it might be, I immediately know I must have it. But until I see it, the treasure remains a mystery.

Near the end of the hour, I rounded the end of an aisle in the far back corner of the store. On the floor sat a beat-up old cardboard box. One corner was torn halfway down the seam. The flaps were open and dusty. It was full of wooden “sticks” that protruded up and beyond the top of the box like a tangle of rejected scrap.

In handwritten black marker letters, it said, “Piano keys.” The price of $40 had been marked through. Below that, $30 had been marked through. The final price written at the bottom was $10.

In pencil was the promise of “all 88 keys.”

Here was something I had never seen before. Dozens of yard sales, junk stores, flea markets, estate sales, old barns, sheds, and discarded piles of stuff; and not once had I ever seen a box of piano keys.

I don’t really play the piano, but I love music. The box spoke to me. “I can be yours for ten bucks,” it said.

I picked up the pieces to hold them in my hands. Ebony and ivory. The black and white keys of an ancient piano. But these were not just the part we’re all used to seeing on a piano. Each piece was the entire key, 18 inches long with the pads and brass ferrules for the other working parts, though the other parts were missing.

I walked away to find Marion.

“I think I’ve found something.”

“What’d you find?”

I hesitated. “A box of piano keys.”

She and my cousin and her husband followed me to the back of the store. Marion shared my enthusiasm. Beverly and Jimmy looked at me like I had lost my mind.

“What in the world are you going to do with that?”

“I don’t know yet, but for ten bucks I’ve gotta have them.”

Very few people understand the junk-to-treasure mentality of a junk-junkie. And I admit, it’s a sickness. But sometimes an opportunity falls into your lap, and you just know that something of value will come from it.

On the ride home, Marion did some research on her phone on ideas of what to do with old piano keys. The internet is full of artsy-fartsy inspiration, even including piano keys. And an idea was born.

When I got home, I laid the keys out on the worktable in my shop. I thought I knew how a keyboard went together, but I discovered microscopic details that I had never noticed before. The notches in the white keys follow a certain pattern. It took me two hours to get it all laid out correctly.

I started to work on a Wednesday. On Thursday afternoon, Marion came down to help. And by the end of day on Friday we finished our project; a wall mounted shelf made from a full set of piano keys. The box did not lie. All 88 keys were present.

I knew from the get-go that I’d make a gift of the shelf to my buddy Shawn. He is one of the best musicians I know and has taught me so much. The junk fairies meant for him to have it.

When we gave it to him on Saturday he gasped, “This is the best gift I’ve ever gotten.”

Trash to treasure.

Sometimes it actually works.