They’re the last to disappear, along with hickory, spicing the ground from mid-autumn through December. I stumble over carpets of the fermenting harvest, some greasy and quick to roll an ankle if you aren’t careful. Juniper and Bittersweet, the other malingerers, droop along the walnut path leading to a new year.

So often on these daily walks, I gaze around to see something I recognize, looking to the ground that remembers what happened here, last year and years before. Otherwise, the busy mind by habit, locks itself into its present worries, generally things that can’t be controlled like the beating my car just took, parked innocently near Target, where a hit and run driver scraped my fender. Scraped, right. Somebody banged the fuck out of your car, my car savvy friend says, that will be at least five grand. I’d rather not send the old year out on that note and so I come back to the walnut, the fruit I’ve known and raked and eaten, the memories that gnaw their way out of its hull and split open three-dimensional:

I am a child in a family perched on lawn chairs below our walnut tree. We don’t really think of it as ours, any more than we think of this time as ours, finite with seasons. We crack open the green balls and dig the shells loose, brown stain creeping into nailbeds. My mother and father are nimble, able to manage a hammer while pinching a cigarette. The kernels go into our Christmas cake and my brother and I hide our hands at school until deep winter.

I pack a couple walnuts in my pocket, meaning to keep them a few weeks, hold their leathery hides to my face and inhale that scent; wild, half creek-bed and half fresh cut lime. Tinged with the dust of childhood, the one thing that has not changed. Placed in a flower pot on my porch, they overnight. The next morning, I find residue of the squirrel’s sunrise pillaging, shards scattered under my feet, the scent held inside dispersed, already a form of cloud. And the squirrel glimpsing the coming year, scampers excitedly straight towards it, leaving the hard remnants of my cache crushed and temporary and oh so precious.

Walnut

It spun around itself many mornings and nights
to make a nesting box—
skin, hull, dark amniotic
membrane, shell,
then what’s beneath the shell.
Each layer smaller,
laid in no haste, but fashioned
against an ill-timed breach,
slowing the hand stained
brackish, nailbeds lined
so no soapy rag can remove
that mortar. At its center,
you pull free the kernel,
nut-meat arthritic
and wrinkled, the old woman
who was forever waiting inside.

Sharon P. Ackerman’s third poetry collection Sweeping the Porch (Pine Row Press) will be published early 2026. Her earlier collection A Legacy of Birds (Kelsay Books) is available on Amazon. You can also find her poems in the Southern Humanities Review, Atlanta Review, Appalachian Places, Salvation South, Cutleaf Journal, Meridian, Broad River Review and many others. She is poetry co-editor for Streetlight Magazine.