On the west side of our house we had a large black walnut tree. It was too tall for us to climb and I don’t remember it as being an attractive tree, but one cool thing was that we could go out side almost any time and pick up walnuts off of the ground. We would spend hours cracking and eating walnuts. The nuts were covered in a husk that was fairly easy to remove but the inside of the husks were messy from lying on the ground so long. We would use dad’s old hammer or in a pinch we would find a rock to crack the small hard shells. It took a while to develop a soft enough swing to not totally smash the nut but hard enough to still brake it open so that we could dig the nut out of the shell. Mom would use the nuts we harvested to put in some homemade fudge or crumpled on top of a freshly baked chocolate cake. To this day I love chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and some walnuts sprinkled on top.