Nuts

This is Téo's 2011 collection of horse chestnuts. It would be much, much larger, only he's not allowed to bring any more home. In fact, this year C stipulated he was only to bring one home, but thanks to my ignorance of this, he managed to get away with one bag.

He'd spend the entire day under the school's horse chestnut tree if he could, picking them up and storing them in whatever's available - bags, buckets, pockets, rolled up in his T-shirt. He slides them down slippery dips, tosses them in the air, uses them as cargo for his cars and trains. He's supposed to pick them all up afterwards, and does so willingly, but nevertheless they fall out of his clothing, lie scattered in the garden, roll around underfoot inside.

It happens every year.

Given his unabated passion for collecting these nuts - his complete inability to pass one by without picking it up - you'd think he'd be an enthusiastic participant in the very similar annual event of walnut collecting.

Not so.

He might grudgingly pick up one or two if I ask, but then disappears to play with the somehow more beguiling horse chestnuts. Lukan won't pick up our walnuts either. Nor C.

This year they were a little more willing, but only because of the novelty value of C's father's handy new walnut-picker-upper-er.

Even so, their definition of being done is OK I've had enough now, as opposed to my definition of when each and every last goddamn one is picked up, and even better if there's time to get those from the neighbour's tree across the road too.

This difference can get a bit tedious when, just as I've finished, the boys decide it would be fun to knock and shake the tree to make more walnuts fall. The difference also gets a bit tedious when "had enough" refers to "had enough of running around with the walnut-picker-upper-er when the basket is full", an apparently very fun activity with the unfortunate side effect of emptying the formerly collected walnuts all over the place. Which, you know, is kind of the opposite of what I think the tool is for.

So. There I am most afternoons these days, in the back garden, the only one of my family compelled to pick up walnuts.

At least this year it's been warm and sunny.

(This was taken on Sunday - I've since refilled the two small white baskets.)