Alternate Worlds Explored Archive b/j

4-20: The Deb Nut & Hard Core Grandma

If you were to select a food that best describes your character, what food would it be?

The tree has stood for almost half a century. It isn't really old given the relative years black walnut trees will grow. But this tree is different and has a name. This tree is called Deb. Yep that's it, just Deb.

Many times during the last almost half century it has been remarked by a few individuals that Deb is a hard nut to crack, when in reality, Deb isn't the nut at all, but she does produce many nuts and they are indeed very hard to crack. Deb in all reality is really very giving of her fruits, err nuts. In fact during the right time of her cycle each year she will drop them to the ground so everyone and anyone can come by and reap her generous gifts.

Deb has a strange sense of humor arising from a conditioned lack of trust, if you look at the offered gifts and the toil it will bring to the individual accepting them. First the "Deb" nuts are covered with a fleshy vegetable hide that will always dye the hands and whatever else touches the broken skin of the nut an indelible blackish-brown. Under this layer of husk is the hard shell of the nut itself. The English walnut can be easily cracked with the point of a stout pocket knife and the meat inside gobbled up with satisfaction. Or a gentle squeeze around the English Walnut applying pressure to the seam joining the two hemispheres will pop it open. But the black walnut from the Deb Tree is not so easily broken into. The Deb Nuts do not give up the meat of their treasure easily at all. A Deb nut is likely to break the tip of the knife or at the worst cause the knife to slip and poke the hand holding the nut. And there is no gentle squeezing with a nut cracker along the seams of the Deb Nut hemisphere.

Out of frustration some individuals have applied the technique of placing the nut on a hard flat surface and hitting it with a hammer. But it isn't very long and the individual applying this technique is confounded either because the Deb Nut has shot out from under the blow of the hammer without so much as a crack and potentially broken a nose or blackened an eye or ricocheted off a cherished porcelain heirloom with the results of much angry shouting and cries of anguish for the cost of trying to crack a Deb Nut; or having smashed the Deb nut into a complete powdery pulp where meat and thick hard splintered shell is impossible to separate.

No, the secret to cracking a Deb nut is patience. When an individual exercises such a gifted amount of patience to finally, very slowly apply pressure from a worm-geared nut cracker to finally cause a crack to suddenly pop then the outer shell can be pried gently with a pair of pliers and a knife. After the meat is exposed inside it still isn't a quick and easy task to remove the tasty nut meats from the thick convolutions of the inner shell. Usually a metal pick is required to dig the nut meats out.

And the reward is so very small. It takes many many Deb Nuts and an unGodly amount of patience to obtain a significant amount of Deb Nut meat to flavor your favorite batch of fudge, or mix in with your Black Walnut Sour Cream Cookies, or even to gain a handful to munch on for that rich and nearly overpowering black walnut flavor.

But the Deb Tree has a wicked sense of humor. Even after all this patience, the individual best still be careful when eating the meats of the Deb Nut because invariably there will be part of the hard shell mixed in and a tooth will break before that fragment of shell.



If you could make someone else live one moment from your own life, who would you select, and what moment?

(Don't forget the reasons behind your decision!)

The moment I would choose....and the person to live it.... ewwww vengence is so sweet!

Please, read the following with caution. It isn't fluff and exposes a bit of the nut meat that was rotten and bitter.

The moment would be the first time my father touched me in a way no adult man should ever touch a young girl let alone a father ever should touch a daughter! And Who would I have live that experience as I lived it? My Paternal Grandmather. Yep you got it, HIS own Mother!

Why? Because my Grandma Abel was the only person my Dad was ever afraid of losing her love and respect. And if she had known from the get go what my dad had done, it would not have gone any further because the woman would have put a stop to it immediately. As she use to say about men who beat their wives, "Hon, the bastard has to fall asleep sometime, and that is when you let em have it double dose of what they gave ya." Many years afterwards when I finally told Grandma part of what Dad had done, she was livid. Dad really hated me after that day because Grandma never forgave him and she believed me over him til the day she died. But I'm thinking, if the first touch over the line had been experienced by Grandma in my body, the years of my adolescence would not have evolved as they did and my father and I would never have been astranged all my adult life. Why? Because Grandma woulda killed him if he didn't behave like a father was suppose to. Yea! That is what I would choose for this if statement




Take care and may your road lead to only good places.

Deb

Compassion and the effort to try and understand some thing that was not understood before is a step toward acceptance not only of others but most importantly of yourself.

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