White Gloves and Black Walnuts

One of the reasons that fall is my favorite season is that it's the best time to enjoy nature (in my opinion).  The temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold.  The critters are still around.  The trees are at their most magnificent and I love how the bright rainbow of spring and summer colors narrow themselves down to a smaller but equally vibrant palette of reds, oranges, yellows, and browns.

Oh, and the bugs aren't as bad.

I don't like bugs.

Anyway, I love to be out and about in the fall and I'm thankful to be in a city with fantastic walking trails that almost...ALMOST...allow me to trick myself into thinking I'm in the country.  

I've been taking full advantage of those trails this fall, and find myself snapping pictures almost every time.  I just can't help it.  It's so beautiful.  Here, see for yourself.

I like that nature helps to draw my focus to God.  Both the vastness of the ocean and the seeming insignificance of the life of an ant help me to remember that, in fact, life isn't all about me.  This is a perspective that I need lots of help keeping in focus.

Nature also makes me think of my cute funny mom.  For any new (or forgetful) readers, my amazing mom battled cancer for 10 years before graduating to heaven in 2004.  I was 24.

I inherited my appreciation of nature from Mom.

Actually, a more accurate statement is that I'm kindof a washed-out imitation of her love of nature.  I like nature as long as I don't get any on me.  Mom was the real deal.

I remember walking with her in the woods, and looking as she pointed out whole worlds we kids were tromping past, completely unaware.  How this moss can tell you what direction you're going.  How that plant is edible but never, never try to eat a plant you don't know because it could poison you.  How to figure out what animals have been around by their tracks.  How to be still long enough to begin to hear the sounds of the forest.

She pointed out mushrooms and cocoons and special flowers and caterpillars and robins and spiders and a whole host of other things that we seemingly ceased instantly to be blind to.

It's a little like magic to be staring at the same 1 foot square bit of forest floor for a full minute, seeing nothing special, and then suddenly, right before your eyes, a morel mushroom appears.  Seriously.  It's not that you didn't see it and then you did.  It wasn't THERE and then it WAS.  Mom could work that sort of sylvan magic.

This walnut tree stand sentinel at the entry to my favorite stretch of trail.  I took these pictures of this walnut tree both because it was showing off with the vivid blue and white of the sky behind it, and because unhusked walnuts always make me think of my mom, and more specifically, of a story she used to tell from her childhood.

Little Susan and the Walnuts

When Mom was little, preschool and kindergarten weren't really a thing.  Most kids, my mother included, started right into first grade.  Mom was the youngest, so on the morning that Grandma Nell was to take her to her first grade interview, they were the only two at home.  Grandpa Roy was at work, and Janet and David were both at school.

Mom, who was from the first, and to her mother's chagrin, a tomboy, was less than enthusiastic about the special outfit she was dressed in.   (This picture isn't from the day of our story, but it will give you an idea.  That's my mom on the right, with her grandma.  Check out that poofy dress, baby!)

In addition to the Sunday dress and dress shoes, Mom was wearing special white gloves for the occassion.

"You may go outside while I get ready, Susan, but don't get your dress dirty," Grandma Nell warned my mom.  Obedient Susan trotted outside, happy to be released into the great outdoors.

After she finished getting ready, Grandma Nell called mom back into the house so they could leave for the interview at the school.  Mom came back in, pleased with herself for having found some way to entertain herself while still being obedient to her mother's admonition to not dirty her dress.  She had decided to collect all the walnuts that had fallen from the tree in the yard.

The dress was clean.  Unfortunately for Grandma Nell, walnuts contain a natural dye.  Little Susan's beautiful white gloves where now permanently stained black.  I can only imagine that this was not the first time Grandma Nell dealt with similar minor crises surrounding her youngest daughter.  In any case, the fine people at the school agreed to allow mom to come to school in spite of her lack of white gloves, and everyone lived to tell the tale.

The End.

May you too find time and space to enjoy God's creation this fall.