Still Hanging On

 

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a pair of walnuts that were still hanging on to a high branch on a tree outside my window.  Shortly afterward, one walnut fell.  Today, weeks later, that one lonely walnut is still clinging to the branch.  It’s a sad sight to me, for some reason.  If I could reach it, I might be tempted to knock it down and get it over with.

I know people like that walnut, clinging desperately to old ways and old ideas, and I have the same compulsion sometimes to give them a whack, perhaps knocking some of their old ideas out of them.

The community my family settled in and has lived in for almost 200 years was fortunate enough to be offered electricity in the 1920s, almost two decades before Rural Electrification brought that modern convenience to the rest of this county.  Knowing what I know about my great-grandfather, I’m sure he was one of the first to sign up.  He was a progressive man.

 Most of the other neighbors in our little bend of the river also were glad to get what must have seemed like a miracle.  But two farms adjoining our property were left out.  Their owners were afraid of the electric lines that would have to cross their land.  I’m not sure exactly what they were afraid of, but it may have been fear that somehow electricity would leak out of the lines and kill them or their livestock. 

Anyway, for whatever reason, the power company had to run the lines a different way to avoid their property.  They totally bypassed the first mile of road frontage and built the lines across my great-uncle’s farm, down the road to the next three farms and an offshoot down our road.  So, even now, the power lines run in a slightly weird way, through the woods and across a big open pasture instead of along the road.

Of course, as anyone could have predicted, when the other farmers in the neighborhood had electricity for a while, the two fearful neighbors noticed it didn’t kill anyone, so they wanted it too.  I suspect their wives may have had something to do with it, after they saw the modern new kitchens with electric refrigerators and stoves and lights that didn’t smoke up the curtains and smell up the room.  So, the power company came back at some point and ran lines off the poles that went to our place, across the holler that runs from the main road to the river bottom, and delivered electricity to those two farms.  Those lines stand as a testament today to men who hung on, like my walnut, to old ways.   And every time I hear someone bemoan modern life and talk about the “good old days” so longingly, I think about those two farmers who, if they had their way, would have been stuck in the good old days with oil lamps and no refrigeration.  Even worse, no air conditioning and no electric blankets.

Sometimes the old ways do turn out to be the best.  Take walnuts, like the one that is clinging so desperately to the tree.  For decades, we have cracked walnuts on the top of our old cistern, using a rock.  It does tend to smash the nuts along with the shells and it occasionally causes a smashed finger for the careless rock wielder.   

But as a simple, low-tech method, it works well.  Once, several years ago, someone gave my mama a nutcracker that was supposed to let you bust open even the hardest nuts with a simple turn of the handle.  As I recall, it was a contraption sort of like a vise grip mounted on a piece of wood, with a metal handle.  I was eager to try it, having suffered several smashed fingers from the old way.  Mama was skeptical.  Turns out, she was right.  For one thing, it was a two-person job – one to hold down the wood part and the other to try to turn the handle.  Almost immediately, the metal part broke away from the wood part.  It was back to the rock on the cistern top, which I still use to this day. 

  I think the nutcracker dimmed my faith in modern technology.  I look through the catalogs with a skeptical eye now at the new, improved gadgets guaranteed to make even the simplest tasks easier and quicker.  Did you know that you can buy a deluxe kit for roasting hot dogs and marshmallows for the low price of $79.95?  A metal stick with interchangeable tips in a special carrying case?  It’s even dishwasher safe.  We have always used a stick.  Simple and disposable and you don’t need the carrying case.  Maybe I should start selling a super deluxe kit which includes several sticks in a sack.  I could sell it for $59.95 and label it as an organic, environmentally friendly marshmallow roasting kit.  I could even give people a choice in the kind of sticks - maple, oak, walnut, or elm.  The dogs love to collect sticks.  I could make a fortune.

Afterword: We had a bunch of tornadoes and thunderstorms over the weekend, after I had written this.  The storm was too much for the lone walnut and it was on the ground when I got up the next morning.  Sometimes it takes a storm to force us to let go.  That’s a philosophical discussion for another day.