Chinquapin

Sometimes on a Journey

You Don’t Go Straight

To Your Starting Out Destination

Yesterday on Facebook I could not with certainty ID a branch and nut as chinquapin because it has been too many years. I had forgotten the leaf design but recognized the nut. It all comes back.

The Massalina Drive house that our parents built in 1937 and that we moved into in January 1938 just before Gina was born, was tucked into the woods. That soon changed as houses were built behind us on Linda Avenue and Allen Avenue, destroying the deep, thick forest between us and the western bend of Massalina Bayou that moves round to Tarpon Dock Bridge.

After our new house was finished, our front yard was plain until the day I stood on the front porch with my mother and watched as my father and a black man called “Ol’ Dave” carefully planted a little three-branch magnolia grandiflora down in the middle. We haven’t lived there in half a century this year, but the magnolia lived and now spreads out across the entire front yard. It’s funny how the heart can take possession of something or someone that belongs to somebody else. That magnolia tree will always be mine. In my lifetime I’ve done that with several babies too, bonding with somebody else’s child. It’s a part of life that likely ends in heartbreak as they grow up and away and you realize that they never really belonged to you in the first place.

We find out that it’s that way with every child passing through. Which reminds me that my mother cried all the way home after they dropped me off at North Hall, University of Florida, Gainesville on my 18th birthday: I was gone forever. Every child of mine has done that to me too. Malinda, Joe, Tass, and now even Kristen. It's the way it is.

But the chinquapin, eh. Our front yard was plain but the back yard was filled with trees and so shady that we never got grass to grow well. Of course, I had to mow the whole thing anyway because there was a sprig here and there, just as I still have to get a haircut now and then. But up a slight rise and fairly close to the house was a little stand of chinquapin trees. We, maybe it was just me, begged for a treehouse for years. Though I had in mind a real treehouse hidden high in one of the oak trees, our father built a platform up about six feet high stretching from trunk to trunk among about four chinquapin trees. It wasn’t the treehouse of my dreams, but it was up and away. Once you get a treehouse you discover that it isn’t really all that great after all, because there’s nothing to do there but sit, but it was a treehouse.

A problem was Boy and Nuts. A stand of chinquapin trees is friend only to squirrels. It covers the ground with nuts that it drops in a protective spiny hull. The spiny hulls dry and become as evil as any yard full of sandspurs. From the day school was out in May until school started again the day after Labor Day in September, a boy was barefoot. Shoes? Unthinkable. This meant it was impossible to get to the treehouse without stepping on chinquapin burrs -- making the treehouse inaccessible. Put on shoes to get there? So absolute was barefoot season that putting on shoes to get there never occurred to me.

Not even tennis shoes -- a blog post for another day perhaps. And eat a chinquapin? Squirrels ate them. I'd sooner have eaten acorns. Little did I know then that they are little chesnuts.

The stand of chinquapin trees was cut and cleared in 1948. For six years, our 1942 Chevrolet had been parked every night under tall pine trees beside the house and was covered with pine droppings, resin. We called it turpentine. My father was about to order a new car -- this was when I was hoping for a Buick from Bubber Nelson but he ordered a Dodge from Karl Wiselogel -- but my mother said no new car until there was a carport for it so the pine trees didn't ruin it. The carport went exactly where the chinquapin trees had been. It was built for one car but a couple years later we got a second car, the 1949 Plymouth woodie wagon and my father expanded the carport to accommodate two cars.

And today as often, my +Time blog post is a windy road of nonsense to nowhere.