Black Walnuts

Back almost a half century ago I can recall us going out to feed sacks full of black walnuts  from the many walnut trees in the area.  It was a job to hull them as the thick, soft, outer hull contained the black walnut stain.

No matter how much care one took by the time all the walnuts were hulled we were all stained walnuts up to our wrists.   Those stains were pretty much permanent and would only disappear once the skin had been replaced.

I can recall one or two years when after we had gathered all the sacks full of walnuts, my brother would park the car near our grandparent's old coal house.  Then he'd jack up the rear, right side (drive wheel) , start the care an put it in gear to leave the wheel which was off the ground spinning.  Then the adults (I was much too young then, surprising as it may seem now) would toss walnuts in front of the spinning tire and it would strip off the outer shell.

Then we'd carry all the hulled walnuts to put in my grandparent's old, steamer trunk.  Memory fails me now, but I think they must have had two of those old trunks.  One was left on the front porch to be filled with coal from the coal house on a regular basis.  If I remember correctly my grandfather paid me $2.00 a week to keep it filled.

But there was another trunk upstairs in the attic where the walnuts were stored.  My grandfather had an oblong piece of metal which we used to crack the  nuts on.  It seemed so large to me at the time but looking back it could not have been all that large.  At a guess with failing memory it might have been 3/4 inch thick, 2 inches wide and 4-6 inches in length.

I can readily recall sitting in front of the pot bellied stove in the living room/bedroom with that piece of steel on my lap and with a hammer cracking those walnuts and gobbling up the nut meats.

It is one of the great mysteries of aging, but I can clearly recall things which happened over a half century ago far better than I can recall things which happened last year, last month, last week or yesterday.  It always puzzled me when my parents and grandparents talked about this phenomena as well as the experience of time passing at an ever increasing speed.
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Now, I'm quite old enough to understand what they were talking about.  And it is very true.  My days, weeks, months, years slip by so quickly I just can't keep up.  Still, I have so many memories from the time I was around two years old up until just a few years ago.

I don't know why I'm so nostalgic about black walnuts since they always gave me "fever blisters".