Road Trip: To the Nearest Independent Bookstore!

As a mom of two teenage boys – and a woman born with a planning mind – my greatest triumph of late is when I get my sons, my husband, and me in the same place. 

That place isn’t normally our house, for each of us spends our time at home dwelling in our own little carved out niches.  Whether doing homework, watching TV, cleaning out a closet or linking up to a screen, our house is where we remove ourselves from the external world and, more often as the boys have gotten older and more independent, from one another.  I do not say this with guilt nor remorse; I acknowledge it as truth. 

An occasional meal together, sitting around the table on a weekend night, makes me yearn for more dedicated time with these people I call family.  I suggest movie nights a couple times a month on Friday evenings – that night of the week when we are absolutely spent from the warp speed we travel on the weekdays.  We square the love seat and sofa up with the TV, pull up ottomans and pull out blankets, pop popcorn and cut up apples. Then the screen, filled with visions and emitting sounds, draws our focus to one topic.  We chuckle and chat during the movie then recap and critique after the movie.

Since I was bald from chemo during the winter of 2010, we have also been drawn to the screen for a Wii game: My Sims Racing.  I remember this because I was able to make my avatar a little bald woman — she now has curly reddish hair. At least a couple times during the cold and snowy months, I suggest we all settle into a game.  The music and the scenery draw me in, while Bill and the boys are lured by the competition, the race.  Everyone knows that the snowy winter scenes are eye candy to me, so our races toggle between those festive tracks and the other non-winter themed tracks – preferably with fences so as to keep my car on the road.  As the boys have gotten older, my play has changed.  I never win, but beyond that, I’m often caught going the wrong direction on the track.  Now, my “Can someone help me?” draws one of my teens back with a good rash of patience to tutor me.

As our family grows older, our individual preferences for how we spend our time pulls at the seams of our togetherness.  We have diverse interests, from playing golf and wielding a needle for embroidery to gymnastics and Minecraft; from larger than life media in the living room and quiet pursuits of crossword puzzles on the porch to the tapping away on the gaming computer’s keyboard and Facetime conversations with friends.  We’re all pursuing activities that we enjoy individually; hence my need to reconvene and find more time and more places that we share.

We went on weekend trips when our sons were young – before basketball games and gymnastics meets drove our weekend agenda.  Perhaps up north to New Hampshire, Vermont, or Maine, and on occasion south to Cape Cod.  Sometimes I planned a trip around a destination, and after planning trips for a while — and inadvertently discovering small independent bookstores along the way, I built these trips based on where such a store stood. 

There is no convincing my family to walk through the doors of a bookstore.  They all know that bookstores are my joy.  I know bookstores are their joy.  And so we enter through the doors, immediately dividing to peruse the graphic novel section, the local writers’ section, the spy book section, the teen section, the history section.  Bill and I often meet up in the gift section and land on that “just right” gift for someone’s birthday, Christmas, or the best gift of just-because. 

Bill and I move continuously through the shelves from topic to topic.  Will and Liam land on a book, take it from the shelf, and sit.  A nearby chair is a luxury.  And if one is not at hand, they slink to the floor under the spot where they found the book, as if all physical energy drained from their fingers when they touched the book.  Will might peruse the cover art before opening the book; Liam, without a doubt, will immediately inhale as he draws the cover open.  For both, an immersion begins.  Few things are as lovely as seeing the pull of a book on my sons…. A calm, passionate focus.

Does an hour pass?  An hour-and-a-half? 

I approach Will, “Would you like that book?”  Little eye contact, just a nod and perhaps a point to another book next to him that he would also like. 

I find Liam, “Are you about ready to go?” 

Liam reading in the heavenly children’s book nook at the River Lights Bookstore in Dubuque, Iowa.

Liam reading in the heavenly children’s book nook at the River Lights Bookstore in Dubuque, Iowa.

One hundred percent of the time, his response is different from Will’s.  “Mom, if you give me fifteen more minutes I’ll finish this graphic novel and save us $15!” 

Bill and I wander for fifteen more minutes.  I add another item to my purchase – to make up for the on-site usage of the graphic novel. 

In a sixth sense experience, I drench myself in the stratospheric confines of a bookstore.  Soaking up all that is until I just can’t wring another good feeling from the walls or the shelves.  I can’t speak for my family, but I know they all experience a similar intensity.  Away from the chaos of home and hearth.

As we leave the store, we are armed with new topics to discuss as a family.  Whether reflecting on the smell of the books, a huge welcoming table to sit at, the new book by a favorite author, or the discovery of a new author, we reconnect during and after a visit to an independent bookstore. 

Now, I do believe it’s time to plan a fall road trip!  I like to think of this link as being a bit like Dorothy’s shoes in the Wizard of Oz: Click it – only once – to find your nearest independent bookstore!

Again at the River Lights Bookstore in Dubuque, Iowa, the solid wooden table surrounded by shelves and shelves of books beckoned Will. How could anyone resist?

Black Walnuts

While backing out of the driveway yesterday morning, my front right van tire hit and skidded on what sounded like a piece of metal.  The combined vibration and sound made Will and I squinch our eyes, putting tight wrinkles in our foreheads.

Once free of the object, we saw nothing other than the squished green husk of a nut.  Deposited by the neighborly squirrels, a walnut had gotten lodged at just the right angle under our tire so as to drag with us a few feet.

I thought of the crafty nature of seagulls:  When a seagull finds a hard-shell clam locked up tight in the surf, it scoops the clam into its beak, soars up high into the sky, then drops the clam onto hard-packed, wet sand created by the high tide.  The seagull dives down to the clam, and if that one solid drop hasn’t broken the shell, the gull hoists it back into the air for repeated drops until the shell breaks open, making the clam meat accessible to the gull’s strong, pointed beak. 

No, squirrels aren’t that crafty.  Surely not.  The squirrel was probably startled by something, dropped the nut, and ran toward the street.  For in our hours spent on the road, Will and I know that’s the direction they run; their safe spot.  The street.

This small nut incident reminded me that this is the beginning of the season that Dad has this year forsworn: picking up black walnuts.  The harvesting of black walnuts starts in the fall and the processing runs throughout the winter months. 

Growing up, I had never considered the difference between the easily cracked walnuts in Grandpa Mills’ mixed nut bowl and the walnuts Mom used in her fudge at Christmas time.  English walnuts were in the nut bowl, and black walnuts were in the fudge.  Only in recent years did I discover that the black walnut, which grows predominately in the wild – as opposed to English walnuts that are grown in orchards – is not an eagerly accepted nut by the general population.  The trees are prevalent in Iowa.

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Since I’ve moved away from my black walnut source – aka: Mom’s freezer, I realize now the value of a quart bag of frozen black walnuts.  If we were to put a market value on the labor that goes into this process, black walnuts would cost more than morel mushrooms – should anyone want to buy them.  Hold that assumption… I just found a retailer that sells black walnuts.

Hammons sells 8 ounces of “Recipe Ready & Fancy – Large” black walnuts for $7.25.  For comparison’s sake, my local store sells 10 ounces of “chopped walnuts” for $7.00.  I’m a little perplexed as I would’ve expected black walnuts to be more expensive given the labor involved to take them from the ground to packaging them in plastic bags. 

As I explored the Hammons site, I found the answer to the low price: they have a hulling machine that removes the husks!  Hammons encourages folks to bring their black walnuts to their farm for processing and, in turn, receive payment which is determined by the weight of the walnut once the husks have been removed by the hulling machine.  (Pop over to Hammons website for a look at the setup.)

The black walnuts in my freezer in Massachusetts were processed differently in Iowa.

Once the black walnuts fall to the ground in the timber, Dad rolls a nut gatherer over the ground to pick up the green and brown husked walnuts.  This tool looks like a bingo cage with a rake handle attached.  The metal wires are just flexible enough for the walnuts to pop through and lodge inside. 

The walnut husks are tight and green when the walnuts are growing on the tree.  When the walnuts fall, the husk has loosened a bit and started to turn brown.  From collecting the walnuts in the timber, Dad dumps the walnuts onto the middle of the gravel driveway near the house and drives over them several times with the pick-up truck.  The movement and weight of the tires breaks the walnuts free from the husks (scientifically known as the pericarps), leaving the hard-shelled nut intact.  (Scientifically, the hard outer shell the protects the seed/nutmeat is known as the endocarp.) If the husks aren’t removed soon after they fall, they turn black and start to harden, or if they are wet, they rot allowing a lovely spot for the larvae of husk flies to live.   

After driving over the walnuts comes the difficult job – the reason Dad has sworn off doing walnuts this year – leaning over and picking up the hundreds of black walnuts and cleaning up the broken husks.  The metal ribs on the nut gatherer are too wide to pick up and contain the freshly hulled nuts.  After the husks are removed, nuts stain – yes, black walnut stain.  Wearing gloves, Dad spreads the freshly hulled walnuts out on a hay rack or truck bed for a few weeks to let the walnuts dry out.   

Similar to the shared process between Mom and Dad in “Corn’s On,” once the  nuts are dried, they become Mom’s domain.  With her flower gardens under snow, Mom’s winter occupation often turns to shelling walnuts.

A few years ago, we found a nutcracker gadget with a handle allowing leverage to be used to crack the nuts. This made the job much easier than trying to balance these hard-shelled little devils and crack them open with a hammer.  Mom processes them in small batches, breaking a pie tin-ful in the basement then taking the pieces up to the kitchen to pick them out with a nutpick.  The black walnut shell actually grows into the nutmeat, so these do not pop out of the shell in perfect halves like the English walnuts; there’s a lot of digging involved to dislodge the pieces.

Mom normally has a quart or two of walnuts picked out and ready to send home with me at Christmas time.  Black walnuts have a distinct taste that does not appeal to many taste buds.  Cilantro and blue cheese are similar in that people either really like black walnuts or cannot stand them.  No middle of the road. 

While Mom makes fudge with these walnuts, I like to generously sprinkle them on salads.  To bring them back to life a bit after being frozen, I heat up a small heavy skillet and then throw in a large handful to dry roast over high heat.  As I continuously move the pan to keep the nuts from burning, the dark brown papery coverings – called the seed coats – start to fall off the nuts and occasionally float into the air as I toss the nuts. 






When they smell roasted and look toasted, I dump the walnuts onto a clean dish towel and roll them around to completely remove the seed coats. 

I add the clean black walnuts to salad greens with a simple vinaigrette and a sprinkling of blue cheese. 

Like cilantro and blue cheese, I leave black walnuts off the menu if we have people over for dinner – unless I sense in someone an adventurous food spirit that would embrace and appreciate these earthy, bold-tasting, labor-infused Juglans nigra. 

 

Cumbersome and Tumultuous

“… pay attention to areas in your body that are harboring tension…”  Those words are from a morning meditation.

As much as I can ground my physical limbs and body parts to the present, my brain feels like twisted metal set in the future one minute and the past the next.  The movement of flipping randomly between those two times is heavy and grating.  Brainwaves haven’t rested in the here and now for weeks. They are like a set of 500 Christmas lights thoroughly entwined and wrapped around themselves -- or a rat’s nest at the end of my curls that can only be undone by breaking the knot off and flicking it away.

This year, the transition from summer to fall has been intense.  For my sons, letting go of the unplanned summer days and starting the school year is much the same as last year – yet this year’s first day of school is an entrée to change.  Will started his junior year in high school; the one where sights are set on the future more than the present.  Liam started his last year of middle school; every milestone and event throughout the school year will be a “last.”

Will completed the classroom portion of Driver’s Ed in August.  In April, he will be driving to school and to gymnastics – and to the grocery store to pick up milk and bread.  When he does his physical driving test, we will need to pay to use the driving school’s car, for the car he takes the test in needs to have an emergency brake between the front seats – or a brake on the passenger side floor.  For the safety of the person administering the driving test.

I want a powerful brake.  I find myself in a rocket that is breaking sound barriers.  There is no brake pedal to push.  There is no emergency break to pull and slow time.  As the school blues settled in, I’ve been with the boys in spirit.  Then, on the first day of school, something switched.  Yes, much is mysteriously looming, and I don’t have a brake, but the uncertainty of what that first day of school holds is now behind us.  We have begun to conquer the unknown.  We can’t put the brakes on the year as it rolls along, but we can embrace every day and squeeze the good stuff out.

When I picked up Will from school the first day, I shared my thoughts.  I said that despite all that his big, fat junior year holds, he’s an upperclassmen – that’s a cool milestone.  Then I asked him, “So, what was the highlight of your day?” 

“Well, my buddies and I found a pipe behind a wall that leads to a grate, a drain, in the sidewalk.  And we figured out if we talk into the pipe, our voice comes out the drain!  It’s going to be a great prank!” Ah, yes, an upperclassman prank! A gem for the day.

I asked the same of Liam:  What was the highlight? 

“The new teacher understands kids!  We can write in pen or pencil or type.  And she’s not going to assign homework on Thursdays and expect us to remember to hand it in on Tuesdays.” A second gem.

With the school days proceeding one by one, today, I return to the routine of writing a complete thought.  And, I am free to chase down my manuscript.  

If you live in the U.S., you probably remember “School House Rock.”  The words and music from this little ditty, “I’m just a bill,” has become my theme song… 

…where Bill = Manuscript;

Committee = Publishing company;

And so on, until Law = Book this fall.

Fully caffeinated, I am working in the library today.