Walnuts past and future

Passing by a house with a small walnut nut outside I was captivated by this cluster of withered female flowers with their tiny fertilised ovaries just starting to swell. They will have been wind pollinated by male catkins on the same tree. Whether they will produce edible nuts is a another matter. There's many a slip between flower and fruit in any plant.

It had me thinking about walnuts. I spent my first few years under a huge walnut tree that towered over our small home, adding shade to its already-shadowy deep valley location but highly valued by my father who pickled the unripe fruit (green walnuts). He invented the verb "to walnut" meaning  to shuffle through the fallen leaves in autumn, never to tread and risk crushing the nuts on the ground. 
Also applied to kittens when we had them.

After we left the house the next incumbents sold the walnut tree to itinerant tree fellers for a pittance. My parents could hardly bear to see the place without it. Here's a photo, taken by my father,  of my mother (and cat) with the tree in the background.

https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/709752


Funnily enough I had bought a packet of walnut halves earlier in the day and at this point I went to look at their country of origin (expecting Turkey) -  Ukraine it said. My father's native land. 


The Black Walnut Tree by Mary Oliver

My mother and I debate:
we could sell
the black walnut tree
to the lumberman,
and pay off the mortgage.
Likely some storm anyway
will churn down its dark boughs,
smashing the house. We talk
slowly, two women trying
in a difficult time to be wise.
Roots in the cellar drains,
I say, and she replies
that the leaves are getting heavier
every year, and the fruit
harder to gather away.
But something brighter than money
moves in our blood–an edge
sharp and quick as a trowel
that wants us to dig and sow.
So we talk, but we don't do
anything. That night I dream
of my fathers out of Bohemia
filling the blue fields
of fresh and generous Ohio
with leaves and vines and orchards.
What my mother and I both know
is that we'd crawl with shame
in the emptiness we'd made
in our own and our fathers' backyard.
So the black walnut tree
swings through another year
of sun and leaping winds,
of leaves and bounding fruit,
and, month after month, the whip-
crack of the mortgage.