The Black Walnut Tree

There’s a big old black walnut tree in my parents’ backyard. It’s right in the center, in the back, where the lawn meets the edge of the woods above the drainage ravine.

It was already a giant when they bought the house when I was on the way in sixty-five. All the branches are high out of reach.

Dad hung swings for us from its huge lower limbs when I was a kid.

The night of Saturday, July 26, 1969, a severe storm blew the top out of the tree. A hard day’s work with saws cleared the debris from the lawn. Mom and Dad had plenty of help.

My brother and I didn't particularly help, but we sure had fun that day.

From that windfall and more, my folks used some of the fallen branches and some old blankets and pieces of canvas to build a tepee for us kids in the backyard. So that summer and following years, our yard was popular among the neighborhood kids.

Some of the large sections of walnut became woodworking projects. Mom squirreled away several nice thick pieces. To this day, I use one of the smaller chunks—which I carefully sanded and polished, as a preteen—as an incense burner. There's a public side and a private side.

Then in the late 1970s, Mom learned about juglenone when she tried to grow a tomato back near the tree. The tomato plant grew tall and spindly, and it begrudged us flowers and fruit. At the time, I didn’t care much, since I never cared much for raw tomatoes. (They’re still not a favorite.)

The nutmeats from the tree didn’t amount to much, as too many of them were dried and shriveled to make it worthwhile to crack them open. The squirrels found plenty of them to eat, however, and nested in its branches and ran around, like rollercoaster cars, on its wide, undulating, spreading limbs. Recently, my parents had a clan of gray squirrels with a lot of white patches in their fur, which was fun to see.

There has always been a vertical split in the trunk facing the house. It’s morphed over time into a more rounded hole. But the split was always a curious thing for me. Over the years, it became an entry way for the carpenter ants, bees, snakes, and other animals that have inhabited its hollow interior.

Paul and I used to pick up fallen walnuts and chuck them into the woods, practicing our pitches by aiming for random tree trunks. My fingers turned black from the juices, but I didn't care, since I wasn’t such a girly-girl. Chucking the nuts into the woods served a useful purpose, too, since it made mowing easier, and walking, too, for that matter.

I have so many memories of enjoying the backyard with that big tree providing us shade. It’s still standing, doing fine, its hollow space quite recently a home for a family of barred owls.

It’s truly a grandmother tree, and I thought I’d sing you this little song of praise.