Once upon a walnut

When my parents decided to start a walnut farm, from scratch, in an area which was unfamiliar, on what was practically a rubbish tip, with little prior knowledge about walnuts, and also build a big house there, and do some other farming too, i thought "huh?" I didn't doubt they could succeed - in that way in which children struggle to see their parents as fallible - my concerns were more base. Why walnuts? I'd never witnessed an abnormal interest in walnuts in the family. Neither hoarded nor hidden, there'd been no indication that walnuts were in anyway remarkable. Then all of a sudden i had a new little sister and her name was Walnut. My older sister and i exchanged disconcerted looks. The competition had changed. Now we were vying for attention with of all things, a walnut. A beach house, i had thought, might be suitable for this time in our lives. Or if dirt had to be involved - grapes i could understand and possibly even embrace myself. If nuts - why not pistachios? Or macadamias? If wood - why not Sandalwood? So i guess this was the encouraging voice i initially presented.

Part of my (non-Freudian) reluctance to become inspired by walnuts was that i didn't even like them myself. That dry, bitter grit akin to snacking on the foreign matter of a vacuum cleaner that was the reward for walnut-chewing. The way that bit of walnut skin would hang around in your mouth, long after closing hours. *Yawn*. The walnut failed to impress. I couldn't recall a time I had ever bought walnuts, cooked with them, ordered them. Not only had walnuts been completely useless to me, they were now appearing to become an enemy. An enemy within. I had to stop my parents embarking on this disastrous journey.

Writing this I can see why Dad gave me the nickname Positive Pete. I can't remember the first harvest we had, the first walnut i ate of a tree we'd grown. But i remember the criticism and the cynicism just disappeared. I'm still astounded by the fact that the walnuts we grow taste nothing like the nuts i grew up eating as walnuts. The rancid nuts, even just the dry, bitter nuts that most people know of as walnuts are nothing like our nuts. It's really weird. I feel like a missionary about our walnuts. And this in turn has a muzzling effect on me because i feel like attempts to speak about them are a part of a marketing strategy and are therefore rendered invalid. But the fact is that our walnuts are amazing.