Homesick for Ohio

I’ve been inside today quilting a tabletopper for my daughter’s orchestra benefit concert silent auction. It’s perfect day for it: Fall weather with sloppy rain and a pretty good breeze. I enjoy the crab apple and red maples shimmering red foliage through the window. It makes me want to go home. I suppose everyone has a time of year which beckons them to their childhood haunts. For me, Fall seems to whisper that I’ve been too long away from my hometown of Toledo, Ohio.

Long about the end of October, I get an itch to start gathering acorns and Buckeye nuts. Every fall there was a contest in my neighborhood to see how many buckeyes could be collected. Buckeye nuts are pretty much inedible; even the squirrels reject them. They are the most beautiful dark, warm shade of shiny brown with a light brown spot which imitates a deer’s eye. A member of the horse chestnut family, the nuts are encased in a thorny husk which must be crushed open to extract them.

If you were lucky enough to have a Buckeye tree in your yard, you were an automatic kid magnet. Droves of children would descend on your yard and grab as many nuts as possible leaving the thorny husks, leaves and stems behind for you to clean up. Lucky, I say! At some point, when the entire neighborhood had been denuded of the buckeye harvest, it was time to count them up. Black plastic yard bags full of nuts would be most accurately counted and a winner proclaimed.

Fortunately, my adopted town of Boise, is home to a few of these trees as well as Burr Oaks which have fabulously furry big acorns. My children used to think I am a bit of a nut myself for going out and picking up these fallen gems; it won’t do until I have a big bowl of them. But, just this weekend, my son who is attending college in Logan, Utah, brought me home four precious buckeyes he picked up while walking across campus. That boy knows the way to his mother’s heart!

Maybe tomorrow is a good day to hunt leaves to press, collect acorns in all their varieties and smell the autumn air redolent with wet leaves, wood smoke, and apple sweetness. I think I may have to pick up some cider