Black Walnut

There is, I am, a Black Walnut tree. in a small town in an eastern state, one whose name you don't need to know. I suspect I have been largely forgotten, but I am not quite correct in that suspicion because there is still one more who might remember. One other being who once leaned against my rough bark and clutched my fruit and leaves in her hands, breathing in.

When the one who still remembers was still with me, she could still reach my branches and leaves. Now I am far too old and too tall for her to do that. Otherwise, she would still like to be doing that - reaching for me. I know that for sure. Which means I do think she remembers, in her own way.

And she is not here, I must not forget that. Perhaps she has forgotten my pungent spice of emerald with ebony, bright green with dark heart and dark where bruised. Colors and edgy scent are what remains of me for her, I fear. The walnuts I offered her but she never ate because she had been told they were poisonous, perhaps like the apple.

That, however, was not true. I would never have poisoned her...

I still recall the Black Walnut tree in our back yard. I could approach it from the ground, where the trunk left the roots behind, but I could also move toward it from the back porch, which was very high like old houses have. The tree was very close to the porch, so I reached. We never worried that the tree might outgrow the porch or even outgrow the house. The two, house and black walnut, were a pair. Paired for life. Still together, as far as I can determine.

Green walnuts fell before their time and there were multitudes. I still remember my amazement at how the sturdy and strong lemon-shaped nuts could be so abundant. The falling might have been the fault of zealous squirrels. Or just because the nuts were born expecting to fall some day. So they would fall, noisily, and I was very aware that they liked to sit among the blades of grass, waiting for the lawnmower to go by, creating a bumpy path for the blades of the machine. 

Mostly, however, both walnuts and tree were safe from invasive cutting devices and competing plant species because of a secret I only learned about recently.

The secret is that black walnut trees are allelopathic, meaning they release a toxin that fends off competitors, perhaps as far out as its drip line. Do not mess with me, it says. Nobody told me this back then when the tree and I were getting to know one another, but I definitely could sense something was going on. The silence of the plants nearby was born from fear.

Because the Juglans nigra produces juglone (the toxic substance we've just mentioned), there can be no other trees close enough to cast a shadow on it, so to speak, and there is no competing foliage at ground level. Flowers and grass are reluctant to grow near the black walnut. Only a weak moss and an impoverished lichen or two are brave enough to survive in the same space as a black walnut tree, inside the circle where rain drips from its leaves during storms.

The tree I have never forgotten is also a yellow walnut. Not the walnuts themselves, not the trunk. The leaves. Year after year, the leaves of this tree stubbornly refused to turn any color other than yellow. Beautiful yellow fan behind the house, in the back yard, right up next to the high porch.

One always remembers a tree like that. My yellow walnut. Its drupes full of other shades of things, like brown, ochre, gold, and black, used to make the world softer and warmer. Or, as far as the juglone goes, maybe used as an herbicide. The poison to be avoided by the girl who knew the tree and loved it despite all the rest.

Brown walnut, giver of juglone, plumbagin, and tannin to color the world. 

The rough walnut trunk and the rough walnut husk are not things of beauty, to be honest. Many things that accompany us are like that, but we do not forget them. Not all that deserves our love must be luxurious or elegant. Sturdy, straight, predictably repetitive are actually better qualities. They are a big part of why I do not forget the black walnut. Its bark matters little.

Its leaves matter. Leaves like feathers in shape and movement, the brightest yellow of all our trees, in autumn. Before that, green plumes held up to sky, letting both sun and indigo seep through. Leaves placed in rows that are placed like feathers. Individual leaves like teardrops or raindrops or peacocks' eyes, only bursting with green. Looking up through a black walnut is very different from looking up through a pine or a maple tree. More air, easier to breathe.

I know now that she's thinking things like:

"The black walnut ties me to my mother. "

The mother who watched or called to her from the kitchen window. Who told her about the poison running through me. Who didn't explain why she still let her daughter play near me.

She ties me to her house of memories, the home she cannot go home to ever again, as the novel says. I anchor the house with its memories. I am going nowhere. My roots may go fifty feet deep by now. Yet she has left, and remains absent, still. I am still the gateway to the back yard. Perhaps her memory scraps include that.

Oh how the black walnut ties me to the back yard, which was a haven reserved for solitary tales like the ones I told myself as I explored every petal, root, and stem possible, year after year. That means it also ties me to Fireflies, Mosquitoes, Moss, and the crushed green globes that many fallen walnuts became. Freshly crushed, they were woody, nutty, green-tasting. A little later, they were slime-edged. A little after that they were back softness, useless except for staining things. 

The blackened black walnuts later would come to mind when I saw black pomegranates harden on tree limbs or on the ground. The persistence of black fruit, miraculously appealing. I saw those pomegranates in a tiny village called Bournazel, less than two hours from Toulouse. Tiny half-deflated balloons silhouetted against worn, ochre stones that must have been acknowledging the tree's aesthetic skill for centuries. It was that silent there. 

I loved Bournazel because it almost had black walnuts in black shells. Except they were pomegranates.

Worms that had been hunted at midnight and were being stored in a special box until taken out as bait for fishing. We both remember those. They weren't pretty, but they had their purpose. They remained at the perfect cool temperature when under the high porch, up against the stone foundation of the old house.

Tadpoles. We remember those as well, but now she doesn't want to have to wonder if she caused the death of hundreds of frogs by not releasing them all in the brook after raising them to adulthood. She thinks they grew up and left the pool where the pollywog-tadpoles were swimming. They would have needed different water. I know she hopes they didn't die. I hope they didn't, too.

Tippy. I can see her like it was yesterday. Red spaniel, perfect dog, never had another don't need another don't want another. She was not afraid to be with the girl beneath the black walnut. She would have yipped and barked and played. The toxin had no effect on her, nor did she chew on the green-hulled walnuts.

Bambi. Ah, the fawn-colored cat with too many toes. She was a less frequent visitor, preferred the sun to the shade. Never climbed any tree, as far as the family knew. A cat never to be forgotten. Seven toes on her front feet, the color of a fawn, a life much loved, and long. She too knew how to avoid the curse of the dropping walnuts.

Mushrooms, there were some of those scattered about, as I recall. They might have been beneath that high porch, which was high enough to allow a person slightly bent over to come in. To check on the worms in their box, perhaps. Or to look for something else that might have been stored there. The girl was small enough to walk underneath without bending at all. I know. That was me.

Celandine (which I later found out is also called tetterwort) scrambled along the side of the high porch closest to the sun. I didn't know the name then, but I did know there had been another maternal caution. Celandine wasn't poisonous - well, maybe not - but it had a bright orange liquid in its stems that stained clothes and fingers in perpetuity if you broke the spindly things. Even the fuzzy, geranium-like leaves, had a bit of color in them, but not the bright, corn-colored flowers. Fragile, fragile blooms, unloved but abundant in their glow beside the dark under-porch.

My mother’s voice is still calliing me from the back window of the kitchen. I can hear her, and I answer. "Coming, Mom, coming!"

Father has finished hanging a deer carcass, gutting it, spraying blood, but since it is all for the good, for food, it is forgiven. Food and lives taken for food were taken seriously. Venison for the winter months justified blood on tree, ground, and father. He loved to eat. I hated the blood, and only saw it once, but it is still there.

The black walnut also ties me to heavy, slight scent of septic line. I wish I could deny it or erase it, but it was there because the house was old. It was only a problem once in a blue moon. However, if you ever discover that smell in an area, every time you go back, you find it wafts toward you. Just a little bit, but even so...

This oldness, which I would now crave, leads to the embarrassment at living in such an old house. I wanted something newer. However, the black walnut was very old and the house had been paired with it for life. I already told you that, I'm sure. I couldn't change either the house or the tree. If I tore down the house, the tree would be an orphan. I could never do that.

The tree pointed to pets buried over the years in the back yard. Some of them I never knew, but the black walnut had been there to watch them. They were further back, by the hollyhocks.

The black walnut listened along while I listened to the frantic news reports about the Watts Riots on the radio. All the while I was wondering where California really was and thinking it was great to live in the east. Violence is not a good thing.

Now I remember playing in a wading pool which at some point became a sand box. At some point I also remembering being saddened when mosquito larvae took over the water so well shaded by the walnut tree. The larvae resembled tadpoles when they were small, but then they emerged to attack neck, arms, and legs, it was clear they had not graduated as frogs from the water. Sand became safer, but didn't really cool anybody off in the summer.

I watched them all prepare their cook-outs and from somewhere there would appear a picnic bench. They prepared everything but the meat inside and passed it over the railing of the high porch. The slapped-together barbecue of bricks and cinder blocks was more than sufficient fir grilling. I liked hearing them laugh and even enjoyed the grilling part, because they were smart and would never let any flames reach me.

Every August, at the end of the month, I watched them packing the boat and trailer to go on vacation to Alexandria Bay. They went back and forth like ants, sometimes working at night, with a Coleman lantern hissing away at the bugs. They worked so hard, just to spend ten days. They took a long time packing. Like the summer cook-outs, it was about the slow unfolding of an event, dragging it out, doing it together. At night I felt like the family's sentinel. Nobody would ever steal anything because people weren't like that. Nobody would steal, and nobody did drugs except for the ones you got with a prescription at the pharmacy.

Times change. Even I, a black walnut tree, know that.

All these lives are entwined like the proverbial nineteenth-century Maypole. A Black Walnut Maypole. Lives braided like satin ribbons. Ribbons I hold in all my branches. And ribbons I control by first encircling each of my fingers with them. We know what to do with ribbons.

Not long afterward the mother with the voice that came from the window was gone. That meant the house had become orphaned. Things were going to change. I received a call from somebody. Nobody I knew. Somebody. He came right out and offered quite a bit of money to buy the living tree in order to kill it for furniture.

It's possible there aren't that many black walnut trees in the northeastern part of the country. It was a lot of money. My life was at stake. My tree was at stake. Hanging by a thread and by a pile of cash. Good cash, honest cash. Needed cash, because the funeral had cost a lot.

The offer was mine to accept.

The offer was hers to refuse.

My mother, my father, the fireflies, the worms in their boxes, the brave moss and lichens, the celandine with its orange ink ready to paint sneakers and fingers, the walnuts with their potential to become walnut ink, the tadpoles and even the mosquito larvae, and I. We all listened to the offer to cut down the tree. The Black Walnut that I should have capitalized throughout this story but have not - it too listened, holding its breath. 

That wasn't necessary - holding its breath - because we all said no. Immediately and forever.

Because you can’t put a price on all those lives, not when they're bound together by satin ribbon and a child who still remembers.