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What do you call millions of mayflies swooping in and covering your house, boat, cars and ground? Annoying? Ridiculous? I call it a plague. When these two-inch long cousins of the dragonfly swarm in, there’s nothing to do but watch in amazement. They covered our family lake retreat in eastern North Carolina with the speed […]
By Lisa Batten Kunkleman Eureka! Sadie Hound finally went. All day I’d been begging her to go outside and do her business. Her eyeballs had to be floating. Every time the torrential rain slowed down a tad, I tried again. Of course I’m the one who got wet, standing out in the rain trying to […]
By Lisa Batten Kunkleman I’ve always wanted to be a professional student. If time and money allowed, I’d be signing up to audit all kinds of classes. No tests or projects for grades, thank you. Now that we have an empty nest, how fun it would be to sneak, unseen, into the back of […]
By Lisa Batten Kunkleman How can you tell if animal behavior is good or bad? While I was out of town, my man Dan sent me a short video of our male horse bullying our mare. He was aggravating her with his head and trying to bite her rear. When I got home Dan called […]
By Lisa Batten Kunkleman
My twenty-year old son Sam walks barefoot in our backyard picking up walnuts with his long, thin, size thirteen toes. It’s a special talent I passed down to him with my own sizable hoof.
When the nuts fall off the black walnut tree, the nearly baseball sized hard green outer shell is a threat to an uncovered head. As the green shell dries to black and falls off the actual nut deep inside, the black shells become a nasty nuisance. It takes gloves and rakes to remove the staining shells then. It’s much smarter to remove them in the early hard stage instead of waiting till they dye your hands and shoes black.
A light bulb flickers in my head. I’m not Mark Twain and this is not really Tom Sawyer tricking folks into whitewashing his fence, but I can’t help thinking this seems like a good way to get the walnuts picked out of the yard.
I say to Sam, “Think you could hit that sweet gum tree with a walnut?”
“Which one?” he asks.
“That big one in that leafy natural area. The squirrels haul the nuts over there to chomp into the hard shells anyway. Never let a squirrel bite you. They must have teeth of steel.”
“Mama, I got bad aim,” Sam says after pitching the first nut to the right of the tree.
“Yeah and you also “got” bad grammar,” I tell my six-foot three baby boy who actually has impeccable grammar.
“Naw, my grammar’s all right.”
He throws one walnut after the other, hitting the tree and splattering the green outer shell about every third throw.
Next thing I know, here comes his daddy, saying, “Want me to show you how to hit that tree?”
This is working out even better than I expected. His father is not a bystander.
“There we go,” says Daddy Dan when he hits the tree. And I hear, “All right! Did you see that one, Sam? Did you see that nut explode when it hit the tree? Maybe that sweet gum tree will feel the pain and stop dropping spikey sweet gum balls.
“Hey! I want to play,” says our oldest daughter flouncing down the deck steps to join the competition. Perfect. Many hands make light work, as they say. And like Tom Sawyer’s friends, my family never even knows they’re working.
By Lisa Batten Kunkleman They say a picture is worth a thousand words. They also say writers should use their words to show, not tell. These pictures of our family’s house at Lake Waccamaw, NC and all the Facebook photos and videos, plus news reports speak volumes about the unpredictability of flood waters. Lumberton, my […]
By Lisa Kunkleman They caught one! They actually did it! I never thought I’d be burying a squirrel caught by my squirrel-chasing dogs. I’ll call him ‘Little Guy’. Probably one of the little acrobats I enjoy watching run around our trees like they’ve had a triple shot of espresso. I call them North Carolina’s monkeys. […]
