What’s love got to do with the nut business?

When I think about love, I remember how my childhood friend, Danny, and I used to gather black walnuts and sell them to my dad at his feed store. There were dozens of black walnut trees around the dairy where Danny lived, and his dad was too busy milking cows to take an interest in them. Since the nuts were free for the taking, and my dad had an arrangement with a nut company to buy black walnuts on their behalf, we saw this as an ideal way to get rich quick. And so we put ourselves into the nut business.

I rode my bike out to Danny’s house countless times the autumn of my 12th year, with my rubber boots and oldest pair of jeans in the wire basket bolted to the handlebars. Danny and I spent long afternoons gathering the sticky black nuts into burlap sacks, squealing when our fingers went through the brittle jacket of a particularly mushy one. We chased each other around the trees with fingers covered in goop and often forgot about the job at hand. 

What’s love got to do with it?

I can’t remember how much money we worked into our pockets that summer, but I do know that going into the nut business with Danny was a pretty good way to fall in love. Of course, we were just kids, and we didn’t know what to do with those feelings. All we knew was that we had a lot of fun together, and we wanted to be around each other all the time. The nut business gave us a great excuse to do just that.

The next year, we entered junior high in different schools and found new interests and new groups of friends. We let the walnuts rot on the ground and turned our backs on them the same way Danny’s father did. But we never turned our backs on the love and friendship that grew in sticky muck of our nut business. It matured into a different kind of love — a more familial love — that I still feel deeply today.

What’s your version of the nut business?

Nothing evokes our feelings quite like the power of love. Young love. Romantic love. Secret love. Forbidden love. Longing, lust, and loss. Any way you look at it, the passion runs deep, and the stories are ripe for exploring. 

I’d love to hear from you.