black walnuts

Walking the other day by a gulch, Bachelard's Water and Dreams tucked under my arm, I stopped to watch a squirrel. Some unrecognizable dark matter bulged from his mouth, and I was drawn and repulsed by this sight. What was that thing? I tried to make sense of it as a foodstuff for squirrels, but couldn't place what kind of nut that must be. The squirrel and I stared at each other for a moment -- perhaps he was wondering what book I was reading? -- before heading on in our separate directions (squirrel up, me only forward, as I'm unfortunately more limited in my ability to travel vertically).

After a few more feet, I realized what the squirrel had been schlepping. The ground here was covered with walnuts, their once-green outer coverings turned winter shades of darkest hummus, beginning the slow process of rotting off to reveal the lighter brown walnut shell. I am intimate with this nut, with the multi-layered and labored process of its exposure, not because I particularly like walnuts (I don't), but because they are bound to my memories of my grandmother, Pearl Price.

I remember her in an image: shoulder-length shock white hair and arms black to the elbow from shelling walnuts. Her name doubling the association with shelling and revealing as she herself linked it to the story of (the) Pearl (of great) Price. Like me, she was to some degree a shell-dweller as well as a shell opener. Her life remains a mystery to me, and something of a shell-game, too; I watch the pieces of her history move around the table, but when I look underneath I'm not sure I see her there. I think of Bachelard again, not Water and Dreams but his chapter on shells in Poetics of Space, where he writes that when we observe or examine shells “it is the formation, not the form, that remains mysterious.”


that's all I can write for now, and it's not even the beginning, but I'm putting it up because I want something nicer at the top of the page.