Walnut

A few weeks ago, I found a wood frame at the thrift store. Spent a few days looking at it, trying to figure out what it wanted to be. It said, a walnut. I imagined tiny portraits, curled figures, decorative objects, but it just kept saying no, just a walnut. So I took out the nut bowl and arranged a few walnuts on the table, with some filberts for contrast, but the composition wouldn't work. Just one walnut, stupid.

Fine.

So I painted a walnut.

Walnuts are meaningful to me. In the winter of 1990, we spent Christmas at a great aunt's cabin in the sequoia forest. My grandparents showed up with a mesh sack of walnuts the size of a dead body, which they bought at a roadside stand on the drive up from the airport. They dropped it in the middle of the room where my mother and aunts were sitting and said, "Whatever you can shell, you can keep." For the next week, we all sat in the cabin by the wood stove, talking and cracking and bagging up walnuts in big ziplock bags. By the end of the holiday, we had shelled about half the sack, and everyone was packing fat baggies of nuts into their suitcases. My grandmother looked from the mesh sack of unshelled walnuts to the neat baggies of nuts my mother had stacked on the coffee table, and said, "Actually, we'll just take the shelled ones. There's no way we can get that sack of walnuts on the plane." So we went back to the reservation that winter with a sack of walnuts the size of half a dead body rolling around in the back of the truck. There were no satellite dishes or phone lines on Black Mesa, and for much of the winter the mud roads were impassable, so we took our entertainment where we could find it. We had the only VCR in the teacher's housing, and a subscription to a mail service that shipped 2 movies every other month, which Donna (the former cop, who would shoot herself in the leg the following spring) filled up with Mel Gibson and Bruce Willis films. And we had nuts, goddamn it. For the rest of the winter, teachers trudged over to our trailer in the snow, kicked the muck off their boots, and plopped down on our couch with empty mason jars to watch Lethal Weapon 2 for the hundredth time and crack walnuts. The nutmeat went into one mason jar, and the shells went into the other. Donna and Diane lived in a hogan down the hill, with no electricity, no heater, and a mountain lion stalking the outhouse (which would lead to the aforementioned gunshot wound), and the walnut shells were really good for throwing into the wood stove to keep the fire burning on long, cold nights.

Walnuts in the winter mean safety, family, friends, and warmth. And Danny Glover on an exploding toilet. The important stuff.