There once was a walnut tree in my front yard, long before it was my front yard. As a point of fact, where there is one walnut tree there are always more, a detail owed to the prolific re-seeding nature of the walnut tree. When my son was young, a mysterious condition befell him on a random day late in the summer. The condition had but one symptom, that being a concerning pattern of bruises and subcutaneous blood pooling on the undersides of his feet. At first, the marks appeared to be mere stains, something that a simple bath might cure. But after the bath the condition persisted. My wife and I examined his feet, asking him if this hurt or that hurt when we pressed on the marks. Was it Lupus, I wondered. Could it be some variety of Leukemia? That seemed likely to me. I had read extensively on people who travel to foreign beaches who then contract insidious illnesses caused by parasites in the seemingly clean, sun-bleached sand. We had been on such a beach earlier that year, so that also seemed a near certainty. I texted a photo of his feet to a few clients who are also doctors, each of them more baffled by this rare condition than the last. The internet doctors suggested that if there was also a headache on the left side of the patient’s temple then there would be no doubt: it’s something serious, all right. After a troubling afternoon we rushed him to the local clinic where the doctor pulled out a flashlight to more closely examine this rarest of conditions. The odds that this local doctor would know what this was felt dubious at best, as he certainly isn’t the infectious or internal disease specialist we would need. Instead, he wiped at the marks with rubbing alcohol and they disappeared. He asked if we had any walnut trees on our property, which I assured him not only that we did, but that we have more this year than last year and the same was true of last year against the year before. The mysterious and malicious disease was nothing more than stains on my son’s feet caused by walking around the fallen seeds from my walnut forest. When I sweep these cracked and rotting green pods off of my driveway every morning I think about that day, and I can’t bring myself to forgive the trees for that stressful afternoon.
