A Motley Collection of Walnuts

It’s that time again this year to retrieve the best walnuts from several trees on the property. John has pretty much cleaned up the majority of them near the house from the tree overhanging the rustic table in front and another couple towards the street, close to the driveway. With Jake’s help most of that lot have been sorted and washed, scrubbed and put into different crates that John has carted out to dry in the sun on large tarps on the fine days and returned back to cover in our barn towards evening. The frequent rainstorms and massive amount of humidity in the air has worked against him but he kept going…and now most seem to be dry and free from any hint of mold. As John reminded me yesterday, we still have last year’s nuts and the year before to finish off. But we kept going anyway. With so much rain this year’s crop is abundant and the nuts are generally larger than normal (just like the two nuts that persist with collecting these new nuts).
So yesterday morning it was bright outside and sunny. A perfect day for gathering up the very big walnuts on a paddock in the back next to our backyard, past the chook house. The area is unkempt to say the least and even sheep haven’t had a good clean up feed there lately. But it works as a great playground for the chickens that parade around there looking for any morsels of interest to fight over. After John raked most of the nuts to my side of the old and rather forsaken tree, I scooped up the catch, one at a time at first, taking only the cleanest ones to toss into the big white bucket. Within a few minutes though, I was throwing all of them in…the good, the bad and the very ugly. Some had some sticky black gunk on them where the husk had started to break down. I know the feeling.
Eventually, John lost interest in the whole procedure and told me to stop because we had enough. After he carried the tall bucket away, I finished where I was working and started looking inside the thick mounds of bright green grass to see what those big bumps were that I stepped on getting to this tree. Well, well, I thought. Here was the mother lode buried under the thick blades that I had to dig out with my fingers. Eventually, I too, grew tired of doing this but had definitely found at least another twenty or so of the biggest walnuts of the day and the cleanest. Proudly, I lifted the smaller bucket and dragged the rake back to our yard, then as I approached our house the bucket got heavier and heavier so I deposited my collections by the door and went inside to collapse. Of course, some thanks must go to my feathery helpers that made all kinds of screeching noises as I stomped on a few nuts for their dining pleasure. Soon I was surrounded by blobs of feathers with beaks, but the crowd thinned out quickly as I had little interest to stomp on walnuts continually and besides, I wanted to put most of them into the bucket. The last few stragglers got the best of the bounty since their competition had left the scene a little too early. But we all got some real satisfaction in a job well done. Now all we have to do is figure out how many walnut coffee cakes and biscotti and walnut brownies and walnut whatevers I need to make to get through these hard-shelled nutmeats. And oh yes, John has to shell the ones I want to use. He’ll love that job. It is thankless and endless and the progress comes very slowly. But I swear on a stack of bibles that we will get through these this year. Really.
Now all I have to do when I have some time is find that old stack of bibles.