November rolls around, and lots of folks start dreaming of turkey. But for some reason I am thinking about walnuts. On Thanksgiving morning my mom would put out the big bowl filled with mixed nuts and that was our sustenance until we gathered around the table at 1:00. We were read the riot act about being pleasant around the table and cut off from our normal, locust-fashioned snacking routines. According to my mother the “kitchen was closed” and that is something I subscribe to with my own grandchildren. That was a major bummer so we would commandeer my dad’s desk to set up our metal hockey game and skittles maze. We needed to polish up our skills to maintain an advantage when our cousins on my mom’s side, all good athletes who towered over us, arrived. They would descend in their letter sweaters ready to teach us a thing or two on the playing fields or in our house whenever a competition was involved. They were equally comfortable living off the land, hunting and fishing as well as scoring touchdowns and hitting home runs. They were out of our league, big time.
Photo by Joan Heffernan
You can thank the native Eastern Gray Squirrel for its important role in forest regeneration by caching all those acorns.
But back to the nuts. We needed energy to keep those cousins at bay for a few minutes. My mom left us a few lobster crackers and a pick which worked well with the nuts so we would get to work, assembly line fashion. One brother selected the nut, another cracked it, another extracted the meat and I fished the chunks of shell out of the bowl. Our favorites were the walnuts. We refused to deal with the brazil nuts or the almonds. Like little squirrels, we would crack the nuts, extract the meat and go back for more. Occasionally my dad would appear at our feeding station, the nut bowl, and remind us of his childhood days when he would collect walnuts from the black walnut trees in his yard and try to sell them to neighbors. It seems funny because decades later, I find myself in a house surrounded by towering black walnut trees and have had little success either collecting the nuts or selling them to our neighbors. And continuing with the sidebar, to add insult to injury, we have a barn which was open to the great outdoors and squirrels decided to fill our living spaces with walnuts. It was pretty industrious of them and when we closed up their gateway to the outside and opened up the walls, nuts fell down like a slot machine payoff, ca-ching ca-ching. The squirrels still lurk in the yard, peeking in the windows and occasionally find their way into the house, just to take a trip down memory lane.
Somehow I still admire the grey squirrels when they are not trying to break into our house. I see them madly gathering nuts and caching them in any nook and cranny in our yard. They hang upside down on our mulberry tree. Or they dig to China and plop their nuts down that hole to be consumed on another day. It is so forward thinking. All this work preparing for winter includes some routine maintenance on their drey (leaf filled nests) that you see in treetops throughout town. These nests may look flimsy, but squirrels know how to build them to withstand the New England weather. They provide a great vantage point for the arboreal rodents, as sleeping and napping and nut consumption are an important part of a squirrel’s day. What’s not to love about that?