At our house on Main Street in Sheldon, Illinois we had a walnut tree. All the other trees we had were shade trees, most of which my dad planted from little saplings we found in the woods. But this particular tree I think was on the property when we bought the house in 1956. My older brothers and sisters might know for sure.
What was so cool about this walnut tree was the way the branches were set on the trunk. It was the perfect climbing tree and the only tree we could climb (because dad said so). All the other trees in our yard he had trimmed the branches up high so we couldn’t reach the lower branches, but not the walnut tree.
It produced walnuts every year. In the Fall, the walnuts would ripen into these big green nuts. Once they fell on the ground or we picked them off the tree, we would set them on the sidewalk to dry. You have to let the semi-soft outer green shell dry first. And stink! If you’ve ever smelled the outer green layer of a walnut you will never forget it. And that green shell was sticky too. So that smell stayed on your hands for awhile, until it wore off. Once the outer shell had dried, we woud break that shell off and there would be another brown shell that protected the actual walnut.
We never had much luck with getting good walnuts because for some reason they were mostly rotten when we opened them up. But every once in awhile we would get enough for mom to add to some chocolate chips cookies. These were black walnuts so they were very robust and hearty tasting. Black walnuts are not my favorite (I prefer the English walnut, milder in taste) but it’s pretty cool to think of the process we went through to get a little handful of nuts and our mom made the effort to make some cookies with them.
But mostly I rememer this walnut tree as an awesome climbing tree. I spent many hours in that tree, knew every branch. It was a great place to spend an afternoon, daydreaming and whiling away the hours just being a kid.
One time, Mary and I and a couple of the Bowton girls got into a fight with some boys that lived across the tracks in the old Sieg house. We were in our yard and they were on the train tracks. There were six boys (some were teenagers) and they were rough! I don’t think we started the fight, I think they were yelling at us, taunting us, being bullies. They started throwing walnuts at us and we started chucking rotten tomatoes from our garden back at them. How they got those walnuts from our yard, we don’t know…we figured they probably snuck over in the night and stole ’em. But they had a stockpile of them. A couple of those walnuts found their mark and hit us and boy did that smart. They left bruises. A couple girls were in tears (pretty sure I wasn’t one of them because I was a tomboy, you know, and had to be tough). But we decided that was a dangerous game and we walked away before someone got hit in the head. They were bullies! WE knew better than to throw walnuts. Something our parents would never allow us to do because they were dangerous when launched, especially with the strength some of those boys had. Geesh! Picking on a bunch of girls.
I still have fond memories of that black walnut tree in spite of that bullies game.