Bombs Away!

I like to write outside. It’s especially nice in the Fall. Except there’s one little problem.

Black walnut trees–there are at least three of them right outside our door. The nearest one produces big green nuts as big as baseballs, thousands of ’em. And all week long, the tree has been dropping them. You should hear it when the wind blows: it sounds like D-Day.

So I’m sitting in my chair, trying to write, and these large, hard nuts are falling all around me. Maybe I ought to get a batting helmet.

Are they edible? Sure–and black walnuts ain’t cheap, either. To get at the nut, first you have to get through the green skin and the green insides, which will stain you brown for weeks, no way to wash it off; and then you come to the actual nut shell, which is as hard as a rock. Inside that is a small, edible nut which will have cost you much more labor than it’s worth.

This year’s crop is infested with white worms that eat the yellow stuff between the outer skin and the inner shell. They make no contact with the edible nut, but the sight of them is not appetizing.

Meanwhile, it’s still “Bombs away!” out there. You can hardly walk across the yard for all the nuts, but the tree isn’t out of ammo yet. I dassn’t sit down to write without first offering up a prayer that I don’t get beaned.

So far, so good.

P.S.–The link to “white worms” has absolutely nothing to do with the worms you find in these walnuts. The Wikipedia article has to do with “white worms” used to feed aquarium fish. My white worms are merely disgusting.