Walnuts on My Windshield
Friday, October 28, 2005

Much can be said this week about both walnuts and windshields. I will start with walnuts.

We have two walnut trees in our front yard, between the driveways. The short driveway is gravel with a fair amount of grass, and it runs from the road to our "garage" door. The garage is not really a garage; it's a playroom. Therefore we call that large white overhead door on the playroom the garage door. The playroom is not really a playroom, either, because as the kids have grown, they have taken less and less to playing in there. The playroom is actually a one-car-garage-sized portable building that is mounted on skids next to the house. It was installed by the previous owners as neither a garage nor a playroom, but as an antique shop.

Mrs. Pritchard collected antiques and had decorated the house with them throughout. I guess she had a superfluity of such valuables, so she decided to start selling them. The "garage" was added, so that she could do so from the comfort of her own home. No lengthy travels into town to flea markets for Mrs. Pritchard! The playroom is about five feet from the side of the house, so a tiny hallway was built to attach the one to the other. It is five feet square with a door in each wall: one to the playroom, one to the house (dining room), one to the front yard, and one to the back. Yes, it is possible to open all four doors at once, but several people trying to walk through the "breezeway" (as we call it), with all the door open looks like something from the Three Stooges.

The playroom is carpeted with green indoor-outdoor carpeting, as is our front porch. Occasionally, Mrs. Pritchard been known to park her car in there, but they kept a large, flat pan of cat litter strategically positioned to protect the carpet. The room has no heat or air conditioning, but that did not bother our children when they were small. They happily played in there with Legos, Lincoln Logs, car and train tracks, etc. for many hours, unless the weather was horridly hot or cold. As they grew older and more sensitive to temperature extremes, we bought a couple of those oil-filled heater jobbies and some fans on stands, those amenities allowed the playroom to continue to be used as such.

Now the big kids are older and their play is more likely to consist of books and computers, neither of which is located in the playroom. Andrew is a highly social guy and the thought of his playing alone there (or anywhere) is, to him, untenable. Hence, the playroom isn't used so much as a playroom as for a storage room. In there, one can find all those educational posters I bought and laminated when we lived in Little Rock but have never used; off-season clothing for most of us and boxed hand-me-down clothes for each of the boys to grow into; most of our board games; the extra canned goods that won't fit in the pantry; a pieced-together computer with guts showing that Andrew is allowed to use on occasion; miscellaneous pieces of furniture - some great, some so-so, and some not so good - in various states of repair; and all the leftover cleaning supplies we used on Eva's store, but which I have nowhere else to put.

We never open the "garage" door to the playroom, unless we are preparing for a trip. In that case, I tell the kids to put whatever needs to be loaded in the playroom by the garage door, and then we can back up a vehicle and throw the stuff straight in. That's easier than hauling stuff out onto the porch, down the steps, across the yard and into the van.

I always park the van on the driveway in front of the playroom garage door. Yes, that means that the van is always sitting out and never covered. Actually, we do have a couple of places that the van could be covered. Enter the second (long) driveway. When you turn into our short driveway, beside it and parallel on the left is the long driveway. It goes up to our true garage ("the barn") then continues on to the toyport at the back of our property.

"The barn" is not really a barn at all. It is actually a white wooden structure of undetermined age that we have been told once served as a horse stable. It has two compartments, and the one on the left is just barely large enough to insert the van. However, there are three reasons I don't park the van there.

1. It is far enough from the house to make carrying in stuff like groceries very inconvenient.
2. A family of packrats - or maybe just one very industrious packrat? - lives there. S/he managed to cause $1000 of necessary repairs to The Glorious Golden (our inherited 1976 Cadillac) that was once parked there.
3. If I pull the van into the barn, the only way for me to exit the van is out of the driver's seat, over the middle bench, over the back bench, and out the back door. As I mentioned, "the barn" will accept the van but will not allow its doors to open.

The toyport could also accommodate the van and provide a roof for it. The Pritchards evidently had a large RV - one of those veritable houses on wheels. I guess it was huge and they had nowhere to store it, so, after they installed the large (12'x 30' portable building) "shop" at the far back edge of the property, they added an enormous (30 foot long? ten foot high?) carport to cover their RV. When we bought the house, we had no RV, so we stored all kinds of little kids yard toys there. Hence the name, "toyport," by which it is still known today. Currently, it houses a pop-up camper, a wheelbarrow, some miscellaneous junk, and two canoes which are suspended upside down from the roof of said. The van could be parked in the front half of the toyport (the camper being at the far back), but positioning the entire length of the van under the roof requires greater parking skills than I possess. Also, rather than being 50 feet from the back breezeway door like "the barn" is, the toyport is probably 150 feet away. Who wants to haul groceries, Wal-Mart, Sam's and/or library books that far???

So, the van stays on the short driveway, a mere eight steps from the front breezeway door. The Honda, which Scott drives, is parked near the bottom of the long driveway, under a huge boxelder tree. The two above-mentioned walnut trees are in the "median" strip of grass (well, most of our "grass" is technically weeds, but we still refer to the reduction in height of that greenery as "mowing the grass") between the two driveways. One of the walnut trees overhangs the playroom, so in October, we continually hear loud noises like "THUNK-duhhh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh" as the walnuts hit the playroom roof and roll off. Yes, some of them probably hit the van, too, but we don't usually hear them, so I try not to think about that.

In addition to the noise caused by the tumbling walnuts, and the possibility of being wanged on the head by one, there is the additional danger of trying to walk between either vehicle and the house. You see, the walnuts tend to fall at about the same time as the leaves, and, being heavier than leaves, walnuts sink to the bottom. Hence, the walnuts on the ground are not readily visible. It's like trying to walk an obstacle course with 500 invisible over-sized golf balls underfoot. There may be advantages… I guess it could be said that we have all developed an uncommonly good sense of balance… but I really think the walnuts are more treacherous than advantageous.

Given all that, you may well ask why we don't just pick up the walnuts and use them. I, too, have wondered the same thing, and once in the early years, I tried just that. However, I learned that this was an exercise in futility. First, walnuts stink. They are also extremely messy. They are sort of puke-ugly green on the outside, but getting to the actual nut inside is virtually impossible. It requires a hammer, and you get all this black-brown goop all over your hands and anything else the hammered-open walnut flesh touches. It doesn't come off hands or out of clothing or carpet. That much we have proven. Then, when we finally got the beastie open, there was ALWAYS a white worm in it. How gross!!! It only took me hammering my way through about ten walnuts to figure out that I'd rather pay $6.00/pound, shelled for them at Sam's.

So, every year, we endure the walnuts. This year, I got a brainy idea. I asked Katie, our Research Consultant, to find out if we could do anything useful with these walnuts. She went online and learned that there is a walnut-hulling operation in Highlandville. How nice! Highlandville is about 20 miles north of here, more or less on the way to Springfield. I called them up. Now, we think Walnut Shade is rural, but I'm telling you it's got nothing on Highlandville! This woman (is a female "good old boy" considered a "good old girl?") sounded straight off the farm. Yes, they had a walnut huller. They'd be a-runnin' from about 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, but there'd be a bit of a line in the afternoons. It'd be a might better to come in the morning. How long would it take to hull my two trees' worth of walnuts? Oh, jest a few minutes, probly, depndin' of course on the line. They'd pay $13 per hunnerd pound 'o' hulled walnuts. Now, they was really a tire and auto place, you know, a garage, but they had the huller out back. Okay. Hmmm.

Well, Jessica and Josiah picked up walnuts. It would have been nice to have some five-gallon buckets for that task, but we didn't, so I advised them to get some boxes out of the shop, put trash bags in them, and load the walnuts that way. You see, our van doesn't have much cargo space, so we'd have to use numerous small containers instead of something big like a trash can. Also, since I'm learning about the areas of inscribed circles and such with Katie's geometry, it seemed like rectangular containers would pack more into that small space better than round ones. It took a couple hours, but they got six boxes of walnuts packed into the back of the van. Meanwhile, I had been doing some rough calculations.

I don't buy walnuts very often, but if my memory of $6.00/pound is correct, and if this joint in Highlandville was going to pay us $0.13/pound after hulling, somebody was making a KILLING on walnuts! And it wouldn't be Jessica and Josiah. I hefted one of the boxes and estimated it weighed about 20 pounds. Josiah was one step ahead of me. He had been doing his own walnut calculations on the dining room table. I later found there the remains of his experiment: my four-pound postal scale, a hammer, two walnuts intact, some walnut innerds, and a bit of black-brown goop smeared around. No, there was no newspaper or anything to protect the table - just in case you were wondering. He announced his findings: A whole walnut weighed an average of 2.75 ounces. The desirable part of his specimen weighed 1.25 ounces. He figured that we'd get about half of however much the raw walnuts weighed. I said it would be a little less than half. He said, "whatever." Before we left for the Springfield Library and church (via Highlandville), I noted to myself that 120 pounds of raw walnuts would yield about 50 pounds of hulled walnuts, which would come to a rip-roaring $6.50, to be divided between two kids. I mentioned to Jessica that they'd probably get less than $10 total for their walnuts, but she was okay with that - it was mostly just an adventure.

We and our walnut-scented van did find the tire and auto place near the corner of 160 and O Highway. It was only half a mile from Highlandville's stoplight. There was no one in the office, so I asked a good old boy who was backing a car into the garage for repair where the walnut huller was. He said, "Whale, ya see, it's jest yonder through them gates. Ya jest foller on round and pull up behind the end 'o' the line." So I did. There were several vehicles ahead of us, mostly pickups and/or flatbed trailers FULL of walnuts. These folks must've had walnut GROVES! The gravel road curved downhill to a flat area where vehicles were backing up to the huller. To the left was something that was either a small junkyard or a used car lot. To the right, down behind the huller, was a small pond. Above the pond were some woods. In the pond were the remains of some old vehicles and a couple partial tires sticking out near the bank. It's been very dry in these parts and all the water levels (including those probably masking illegal dumps) are quite low. The water was covered with a solid green scum, but when Josiah threw a hull in, what splashed up was black-brown nastiness. I turned off the van and relaxed. We were clearly going to be here for a while.

It was a bright clear day, about 60 degrees. A rooster and a couple of chickens walked in front of our van, and Andrew got out to investigate. He thought they were turkeys. Poor boy, he's clearly had a deficient education. Josiah was intrigued with the operation of the huller and went down to watch. The girls and I read books and waited. More trucks pulled in behind us. We were about #5 in line. I learned a lot while we waited. For example, if you have a standard pickup truck FULL of walnuts, it will take about 17 minutes to get them all hulled. A walnut hulling operation can also provide a good object lesson for the theory of mathematical limits. You see, the walnuts are dumped or shoveled into a hopper at the bottom front of this affair. There is a "stepped" conveyor that runs a continual loop, grabbing the walnuts and hauling them up. No one knows exactly where they go, but somehow, probably as a direct result of a lot of noise and stench, the naked walnuts come shooting down two tubes on the far left, where they drop into big yellow mesh bags that hold about 50 pounds each. The hulls, on the other hand, go to the right and are shot out onto a large pile of the same, located right beside the pond. Now, I watched this huller do its thing for about an hour, which meant that shredded hulls (about the consistency of potting soil) went shooting onto this pile for an hour. The shooting "arm" was never moved, and the pile was quite high - maybe ten feet? - but the amount of space between the top of the pile and the bottom of the shooting arm never changed! Of course the hulls kept running down all sides of the pile. It was a perfect cone, but its height never changed. If its height had never changed since the machine was turned on, how did the pile get to be ten feet high? That was weird to watch, and I will have to ask Scott, our resident mathematical theoretician to explain that to me.

At long last it was our turn. Josiah was fully persuaded that we'd produce two bags and I was equally convinced that we'd produce one. Well, our walnuts filled one bag and the guy hoisted it onto his 1920s vintage wooden scale. On a highly official dirty scrap of paper, he jotted down "52." The next bag was only about ¼ full when the machine stopped. He weighed it, and below the "52," he wrote "23." Then he tore off that three-inch piece of paper (containing only those two numbers) and handed it to me, congratulating the kids on their 75 pounds of walnuts. Feeling like a dumb city girl (and wanting MONEY, not a scrap of paper!), I said, "So we…?" He replied, "take it up to the office and she'll pay you." Which we did, and she did: $9.75 for the output of two walnut trees. The kids were pleased, and Josiah said he wished we had 100 walnut trees!

All in all, it was an educational experience. After Jessica and Josiah paid Andrew $0.25 for the VERY few walnuts he picked up, they had $4.75 each. That's not much of an hourly wage, but I reminded them that the trees did all the work. We didn't have to water them or fertilize them or anything. There was absolutely no financial investment on our part. We did, of course, have to pick up the walnuts, drive them to Highlandville (for which I graciously didn't charge gas, because it was on the way to church), and wait in line for the huller. The latter was probably the hardest of all! I think the children learned something valuable about how many (most?) people live and work. Their dad earns a lot more than $4.75 an hour, and he doesn't have to bend down, lift, haul, load, or wait. He uses his brain and not his body to earn a living. However, most young people start out earning money with their bodies, not their brains. I'm glad they got to see a practical example of how all that works.

Until next time (when I really will write a bit about windshields),
Patty

From My Book Pile:

The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough, rank 10. I listened to this one. I love to read history. It is very relaxing for me. My life is full of uncertainty, stress, and change. I never know what's going to happen next! History is peaceful, because I don't need to worry about it. It is already done. Whatever was going to happen already did, and that is very satisfying to me. I got hooked Stephen Ambrose (Undaunted Courage, D-Day, etc.) a number of years ago, and love his writing. I'm now on a David McCullough kick, and he is great, too. I am currently reading another of his (won't tell you which one yet!), but this one that I heard on tape was outstanding.

I had read the kids a book about the Johnstown flood years ago and some of us were fascinated by it. Then, when we went to Niagara Falls, we actually went there and saw the remains and toured the museum - sober and intriguing. I knew David McCullough had written a major tome on the subject and was excited to find it on tape. I was not disappointed. He thoroughly explained the social climate, the key players, and the engineering stuff. He's a super story teller and I totally enjoyed this book.

Quote of the Week:

"Inventories can be managed, but people must be led." ~ H. Ross Perot

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