Squirrels littered the back yard of my house on Orange Street. They laughed at me when I came out there. They chittered in a walnut tree as I hammered another board onto the porch. My lard-butt lab, the yellow Allie, would give me a lifted eyebrow about the noise I was making, but refused to chase the “city chickens.”
They lived in a big walnut tree that shaded the back of the fenced yard. A city kid, the wonders of nature to me are indeed that: wonders. I wondered why the weeds grew, the grass browned, the walnut tree was called “walnut tree.” (Does Stevie wonder? I wonder…)
One reason for brown grass was Allie’s downloads. When I took a hose into the yard to blast the offal, wiggly white wonders crawled away. Birds perched on the fence, waiting to feed. No accounting for taste.
I walked in the piebald yard one day, and noticed how much of the grass had survived Allie’s brownouts. The bride had encouraged me to participate in that time-honored tradition: “the cutting of the grass.” I’d had some experience, but had not grown to love the ritual. (I was into the contemplative life: reading and beer drinking.) As I paced the savannah, I turned my ankle on a round, rock-like nut.
My neighbor, leaning on our shared fence, chuckled as I examined a fuzzy green thing. “Walnut,” he offered, in answer to my query. “Tree’s droppin’ ‘em.”
I yanked the starter cord of my borrowed mower, as my laconic neighbor moved away from the fence. Some neighborly advice would have been in order here, but he apparently wanted a safe seat in the comedy club. Show was about to begin.
As the poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “…what a prodigious mowing did we make,” that mower and me. The pings and spangs were barely audible above the roar of the mean, green motor. A loud thock! against my neighbor’s house brought me to the realization that I was shelling the neighborhood with walnuts. The squirrels must have taken delight at the width, depth and height my mower could chock the things. I stilled the mower, grabbed a beer, and sat down to contemplate.
Three days later, the bride suggested that I rake the nuts and mow the brush.
So I raked the nuts, yea, verily unto the night, piling them against the fence, beneath the tree. I chopped them out of the weeds and rolled them out of dog dung. I swore and sweated. My two-year old son and three-year old daughter stood on the porch, hands on their ears, and watched the blue smoke of profanity grow around me. Oh, I laced into those nuts, that tree, the giggling squirrels in the branches above me. Then I had a thought: people eat these things. Yeah! That’s the ticket!
Now happy in my task, I imagined my cute little food processors on the sidewalk, brown bags bulging with walnuts for sale, waving down motorists. Night grew around me; the nut pile rose against the back fence. I tried to calculate how many nuts per bag, how many bags per kid, how much per bag; the math taxed me. I am better with beer.
I banged into the back yard the next morning, startled to a stop: my huge pile of nuts was gone! I stood in the yard, mourning the loss of my nut income. “The Orange Street Squirrels,” that fuzzy, filching bandit bunch, who had gathered walnuts while I lay, chuckled in the walnut tree.