My car’s tires shear soft green husks off the walnuts in the dirt road, though I’m barely creeping across their bumps. Decades ago packs of farm boys would scavenge the brown nuts from the bottoms of these country ruts, and take them off to a flat rock to crack them.  For them, cars were machines for cleaning husks from walnuts.

I lower my window to look around; that flat rock is still within sight somewhere, if I knew where to look. Its covered with pristine moss now.   No moss has been scruffed by boys’ shoes since the web browser was invented.

Walnut husks, when torn, bleed brown sticky oil that is hard to clean from hands and pants, and is especially stubborn on cuticles and nails.  Young boys would have suffered that lesson from their moms, one time only, and would, ever after, know the risks of cracking walnuts with white shirts and hands.

More lost country lore, you’re thinking. But such lost knowledge is more than just lost memories.  As we lose lore, we actually lose chunks of our sensorium, our present power of perception.  I only even see the green balls in the road and feel them thump under the rubber tires of my ca, today, because my dad was one of those country boys once.  And once, with me the little boy in tow,  he walked over to a rut to check on how the nuts were getting de-hulled by the country traffic.   I didn’t get just any sight of walnuts in the road, that floated into my head from the general ether – no, I got his sight of walnuts in the road. He painted overtop my future roads, and gave my nerves the feeling of the shudders in my car’s suspension where my backside would have otherwise felt nothing. Tradition doesn’t veil the world from the artist; tradition shines more colors onto the world’s slate.

This is why you take your children with you whenever and however you can, and pass on the stories, which they might not, or might, use in thirty years. Hand along what you’ve been handed.