Walnut fall
Today began with walnuts. Well, I guess technically it began with breakfast, but walnuts were next an they took up the largest part of this morning. Yesterday the kids spent a lot of time indoors glued to the TV, so I was determined to get them outside. Fortunately our trees have co-operated by dropping leaves all over our yard, so I was able to require the kids to go rake them. This led to hours of raking and jumping with both my kids and neighbor kids as well.
The walnut tree had not only dropped leaves, it had dropped walnuts. Some of these were gathered up last week, but most of them were still on the ground. I made the kids stop raking long enough to help me gather up the nuts. Their co-operation became much more willing after Howard came out to shake the tree. He brought down a veritable hailstorm of nuts and we picked them all up. Then I sat on the steps and pulled husks off of the walnuts while the kids played. Walnut husks are messy. They stain everything. They are even worse when they’ve been left sitting in water for a week. Yuck. I forced myself to finish the job. Now I’ve got 4 buckets and 2 dishpans full of walnuts in their shells. The next step is cracking them all open and drying them. It is a lot of work, but the walnuts from our tree are the yummiest walnuts I’ve ever tasted.
I wish I could say that the afternoon was as fruifully spent as the morning, but it wasn’t. The afternoon slipped away from me until Howard came in saying “Do we have a dinner plan?” I scrounged up a dinner and remained unmotivated to clean up the various messes that filled my home. I did have a burst of energy just before putting little kids to bed. During that I required the kids to help me clean up our family room. I managed it by saying “Let’s surprise Daddy!” They all felt like that would be fun. But Howard wandered out of his office before we were done and Gleek ordered him back in so that he could be surprised when we were done. He disapeared until summoned and was suitably “surprised.”