A Real Nutjob

So yesterday, out of those three rainy-day options (mud spa, mud wrestling, or sitting by the fire), I went with option D--picking up walnuts in a driving rain. There is an explanation for this attack of Crazy, though I'm not sure it's a very good one.

We have two huge black walnut trees right next to the house. Black walnuts, unlike the English walnuts you would typically buy in the store, exude a black (imagine that . . .) substance that will stain anything it touches upon contact. This substance is also toxic to most other plants. In addition, black walnuts are more bitter than English walnuts and stupidly difficult to crack without smashing the nut meats to slivers. This means that we don't bother trying to save them to eat, but we have to get rid of them, lest they totally destroy the lawns and flower beds. So every fall we commence the dreaded Walnut Gathering.

These two trees produce literally hundreds of pounds of walnuts. If not thousands. They litter the ground like little booby traps. You can't take a step without coming down on a round sphere that threatens to throw you off balance and send you crashing down into a bed of black stain. There's really no easy way to gather walnuts. They're heavy, so they can't be raked very easily. And even if you do manage to rake vigorously enough to gather a pile, then it's impossible to scoop them all up together. This leaves picking them up, one by one, by hand. Stoop labor at its finest. Or worstest.

Now. Black walnuts are actually something of a gourmet food item, and are very expensive to buy at the store. If you can find them at all. There are black walnut buying stations that will take a truckload of walnuts from any random person who gathers them and pay by the pound. A. was very excited to learn this. Not so excited when he found that the closest station to us is in southern Pennsylvania. It's not really worth the gas it would take to get there, but he wants to go anyway, just to see the machines and everything. And I've never been down there, so we thought maybe we'd take a road trip with a load of walnuts. The walnuts will at least (we hope) cover gas one way, and we get a mini-vacation out of it.

I suspect only true rednecks would consider a walnut-selling expedition a vacation.

But we have to gather the little bastards anyway, so why not just save them in old feed sacks? Why not indeed. So that's what we've been doing. A. has been very good about gathering them, but he can only do it weekends, because of that pesky little JOB he has. And the buying station is only open until November 10th. Which is how we came to be gathering walnuts yesterday, despite the fact that it was pouring. Like, dripping off the end of my nose. Like, it looked like I just got out of the shower. Like, REALLY NOT APPROPRIATE WEATHER TO BE WORKING OUTDOORS.

However. When it started raining really hard, we only had a couple of empty sacks left. And A. suffers from this same issue I have of not leaving jobs half-done. And then we kept discovering sacks that could hold just a little more.

Two hours later, we ended up with this:

The nuts . . . and the nut. HAHAHAHA!!!

Now you KNOW how many walnuts that is. That is a shitload of walnuts. We hope in this case, a shitload is enough to make gas money. We should be going on A. and K.'s Excellent Walnut Adventure next weekend. Stay tuned . . .