Nuts and Seeds — Small Things That Add Up

Aug. 17/26

There was a jar on my mother's counter I never once saw her open while I was watching. Walnuts, still in some of the shell fragments, like she'd cracked them herself and swept the mess into the jar along with the meat. Nobody explained it. It was just there, the way the coffee can full of bacon grease was just there, the way certain tools hung on certain nails. You didn't ask. You figured it was for something, eventually, and it usually was.

I've been thinking about that jar because I started doing something similar without meaning to make it a thing. A small handful of walnuts or almonds, sometimes a spoonful of sunflower seeds, added onto whatever meal shows up in front of me here at Sagewood. Not a recipe. Not a plan. Just a habit that snuck in sideways, the way most good habits do.

What strikes me, coming at this from the orchard side of things, is how little the tree cares about your daily allowance. An apricot tree doesn't produce fruit in tidy, measured portions — it produces what it produces, all at once, more than any one family could eat, and you deal with the abundance as it comes. Nuts are the same kind of crop, just slower and stingier about it. A walnut tree takes years before it gives you anything worth cracking, and then it keeps giving for decades after you've stopped thinking about the year you planted it. There's something in that patience I didn't appreciate until I was old enough to have some of my own.

I don't know that a handful of almonds does anything measurable for me day to day. I couldn't tell you, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who told me they could feel the difference by Wednesday. What I can tell you is that it's an easy thing to keep doing. It doesn't require the kitchen, doesn't require a decision at mealtime, doesn't ask anything of me except reaching into a bag instead of past it. After twenty-seven years of watching complicated systems — irrigation timing, rotation, weather nobody could predict — I've come around to trusting the small, boring, repeatable thing over the elaborate one. The elaborate thing rarely survives contact with an actual week.

My mother's jar, best as I can figure now, wasn't a health strategy. It was just what was on hand from the tree in the side yard, put somewhere useful, eaten without ceremony. Maybe that's the whole trick — not turning it into something you have to think about, just leaving it where your hand will find it.

I still don't know what she'd have said if I'd asked her about it. I think about that sometimes, the things that sat right in front of you your whole childhood that nobody bothered to explain, because to the person who put them there, they didn't need explaining at all.

Food safety recalls and outbreak information: foodsafety.gov/recalls-and-outbreaks