Name that nut

The other day I was cleaning out my drawer in the bathroom, which led naturally to playing with makeup, which then led to cleaning out my little metal Krishna lunchbox full of old crusty beauty supplies. In the lunchbox I found two strange nuts. I remembered picking them up off the ground at a friend's cabin out in the Mayacamas about five years ago, intending to take them home and identify them. Somehow they ended up in the beauty box, where I've been visiting them on the rare occasions when I actually open the box, though I never did get around to figuring out what kind of nuts they were.

So when I found them again during my beauty supply purge, I decided to crack the nut (an expression I find myself using often lately, for some reason) once and for all, and then get rid of them. The problem was, the nut was not just trapped inside its shell; it was still encased in its leathery outer skin, also known as the hull, and this material was so hard and dry after five years in storage that I could not peel it off. I tried stepping on the nut, but it wouldn't break. Then I tried pounding it a few times with the bottom of a heavy drinking glass. No go.

The obvious next step, since all this was taking place in the bathroom, was to try to cut the hull off with cuticle scissors. Even as I rummaged through the debris on the counter to find them, a little voice was whispering in my ear, "Not such a good idea!" Undaunted, I located the scissors, held the nut firmly between my left thumb and forefinger, and began trying to force the blade between the tightly compressed lips of the hull.

What else did I think was going to happen? The scissors slid across the hard surface of the nut hull and sank deep into the flesh of my index finger. Blood flew everywhere as I hurled both nut and scissors to the floor and ran into the kitchen for the meat cleaver, with which I finally smashed the cursed nut to smithereens.

Okay, so there were only a few drops of blood. But I did smash the nut with a cleaver, only to find out that there was nothing left inside but dust. Then I threw the pieces in the garbage, cleaned and bandaged my finger, and forgot about it.

Until this morning, when I accidentally bumped the wound against a sharp piece of metal. Suddenly it kind of hurt again, and when I examined it under my desklamp I noticed a greenish blackish streak extending about an inch up my finger, originating at the cut. This immediately brought to mind the story of my sister who got blood poisoning a few years ago and had to walk around her house trailing an IV on a little stand, just like the patients on General Hospital.

I spent twenty minutes feverishly searching for information on the Internet, looking at hideous pictures of gangrenous fingers and amputations and wondering if I should douse it with hydrogen peroxide and hope for the best, call the doctor at my lunch break, or go directly to the emergency room ...

Then suddenly I remembered that I had been marking up galleys this morning with a green highlighter. Was it possible that the greenish streak was not some awful infection, but merely a faint leftover bit of ink?

It was. It was possible, and it was ink. I felt like I'd just won the lottery! Nice to be grateful for small things.

(P.S. The nut was a pecan.)

Listening to: Lewis Taylor – When Will I Ever Learn (on KPFA)