my walnut odyssey

september, and my mum was telling me on skype about gathering walnuts, eating walnuts, walnuts being everywhere, i.e. back in romania etc. we happen to have walnut trees next to my grandma's house, so i do have those memories: shuffling through grass full of fallen leaves, and there's a treasure of fallen walnuts just there for you to pick.
mostly walnuts (noix de grenoble, they call them in french) and not any other kind of nut. well ok, there are chestnuts in the city. in my parents' town (which i assume is very typical of your average quiet nice tidy town in transylvania) it's always chestnuts falling on your head while you walk in the street going places. chestnuts are shiny and their maroon color inviting, more glamorous somehow. walnuts are homey and earthy, with their smell of wet leaves and smoke and fall. walnuts are the fall falling.
when you get them out of their outer green shell, they stain your fingers, yellow-brown inked into your palmlines aggressively. but while they're new and young, they're easier to crack, and then you can peel the skin off the edible core, which is almost as joyful as the actual eating.

man, canada has no idea about walnuts!
once i realized this it just seemed crazy that i'd never noticed it before. how have i spent years here, engaging with people and going through motions, without realizing they don't know or care about walnut facts?
they're like, you can get nuts at the grocery store.
yes: there are bags and boxes of nuts sold in stores: plucked, shelled, mixed, as if they were born and packaged naked in a nameless place - no distinction, no smell or texture but the salt or spicy rub. peanuts with pecans with macadamias with my walnuts. sure it's fun to eat, but once i start thinking of it...maybe i'm just too eastern-european for this shit. again.
i raise my eyebrows at myself, because i thought i was over this kind of thing. i got over the tomatoes, ok, i got over how expensive mushrooms are, and how i hugged a jar of pickled cucumbers at the romanian store. i am an urban, contemporary-living person.
i went to look for walnuts at the marketplace.
within jean talon, i only found walnuts unshelled, en vrac, in one place. at 5.99/lb. i went home and complained on all available networks. people generally don't get it, lol.

and the second part to this is the sad trombone consolation story, maybe. i haven't decided yet. i went to a parc-nature and stepped on a walnut, while looking for something else (for squirrels, if you really want to know). it was walnutty, and yet not exactly. a curious look around revealed more of the same, and i picked a few for closer inspection.
they're, as it turns out, much harder to unsheathe, much more liable to stain (2 weeks on i still have a stain on my hand), a much thicker and less smooth wooden shell, much less of an actual edible core. wild walnuts. and i'm vindicated in this bitter-sweet way.
"everything must be tougher/wilder to survive here" - which makes the surprise of finding a walnut in the grass a completely next level joy.
"i found the thing i wanted, but in a gnarly form and too far for comfort."
well, there you go.