When Life Hands You Black Walnuts

Outside the back door at the farm house, just beyond the clothes line, stand two black walnut trees. There is another along the east side of the house as well. The trees have been there for decades. My dad never liked those trees. He always claimed that they were the last trees to get their leaves in the spring and the first to lose them in the fall. The way he talked, one would think the black walnut trees only held onto their leaves for a couple of weeks. In reality, I think they probably get their leaves in May and start losing them by late August. I think Daddy saw summer as lasting about as long as those trees held their leaves....so in his mind about two weeks. He loved summer. It couldn't get too hot for him. Especially as he and Mother got older, they always seemed to be cold. I kid you not when I tell you that when we would visit in the dead of winter, we would pack shorts to wear in the house. They kept the wood furnace stoked to 80 degrees. As we would be sweating even in our shorts, Mother would be saying she felt a little chilly. So for those 2 weeks every summer when the temperature hit 80 or better (and the black walnut trees had their leaves) my dad was happy with the weather. I can't tell you how many times I heard him say in early June that it wouldn't be long until those trees would lose their leaves and the snow would be flying. Yes, my dad could be a pessimist, especially when it came to the weather. If I say anything remotely negative, Eric will call me Earl or tell me that my dad lives on in me.

Those black walnut trees had a worse issue than the length of time they held their leaves. That issue was the walnuts themselves. I love english walnuts. But have you ever tasted a black walnut? They are extremely bitter. I'm not sure that any amount of chocolate could even tame their bitterness. But the biggest problem with the walnuts was the mess they made. They are green as they hang on the tree during early and mid summer. Then by late summer, as they start falling from the trees, their outer coating is beginning to turn black. They are very oily and if you've ever picked one up without thick gloves on, you know they stain your hands yellow and leave a smell on your hands that you will not soon forget. If the nuts are not picked up, and are run over by the lawn mower, the outer coating squishes and makes an oily mess. To actually get to the nut itself, you need to remove the outer coating and dry the nut. Then you have to crack the extremely hard shell to get to the nutmeat. Once you taste that bitter nutmeat, you will wonder why you bothered spending so much time getting to it.

I dreaded the end of summer because it meant going back to school. But even worse, it meant going out and picking up pail after pail, feed sack after feed sack of black walnuts so the lawn could be mowed. Did I forget to mention that these trees were prolific in their production of walnuts, year after endless year? We didn't know anyone who wanted the nuts, so we would dump them in a pile off at the far side of the farm.

There was talk over the years about cutting those trees down, but it never was done. I'm not sure of the reason. Someone would've had to be hired to take them down, and that would have been expensive. Plus, it would have left a lot of bare lawn. We'd heard that black walnut trees release a toxin into the ground that makes it difficult to grow other things where they have been. Maybe the trees remained for those reasons. Or perhaps Daddy wanted to keep those trees around to prove how short summers were. Whatever the reason, those trees still stand today.

Daddy was always good at woodworking and I believe I was in high school when he started making several different kinds of wooden crosses for his family to display on the walls in their homes. One of the kinds he made used black walnuts. He dried the walnuts shells. Then he put them in a vice and cut the sides off of the nut to make it flat. He then glued them to the beautifully finished crosses. One of these crosses hangs next to our kitchen table.

On my morning walks, there is a black walnut tree that hangs over the walking path. In the past few weeks, the tree has started to drop walnuts. They are still green, but I know some strong winds we've had have made them fall. Every time I see them lying on the path, I think of Daddy. One day I stopped and picked one up, just to smell it's pungent scent. It's funny how that smell took me back to my childhood.

It was then that it occurred to me that Daddy had used those walnuts he despised so much to make something so beautiful. Those walnut trees that made his pessimistic side show had been used to create something that represented his eternal optimism. After all, isn't the cross a sign of true optimism? It's a sign of knowing where you are going when you leave this earth. So when Eric calls me Earl, I take it as a huge compliment.  As I look at that beautiful black walnut cross that Daddy made, I am reminded that our time here on earth is fleeting...not much longer than the black walnut leaves cling to the tree. But because of Jesus and the cross, we can be eternally optimistic, because we know that our physical death is not the end. There is more to come.

So, I guess the moral of this story is: When life hands you black walnuts, glue them to the cross.