The Walnut Harvest

My fingers and palms carry a stain, dark chestnut and yellow, like a few-day-old bruise.

Or maybe like the nicotine discolouration I see on customers’ fingertips and nails as they hand over their notes and coins to me in exchange for the next box of cigarettes to continue the cycle. Their rasping laugh or a few throaty words in friendly small-talk, or the obligatory cough brought on by either of the aforementioned, has already told me of their addiction; their tired skin and sallow eyes add confirmation were it needed, of a life-long habit. The young folk wouldn’t take kindly to me warning them, we all know they are invincible and immortal.

So, when the man at the checkout, in his early seventies I surmise, apologises to me while he packs his shopping, for the dark black stains on his fingers and thumbs, I am ahead and have already recognised him as either a scribe or a walnut harvester; it was ink or husk-stain, one or the other and both I know, both I bear myself. He tells me he has been collecting then hulling the nuts from his trees, gathering them ahead of the squirrels who undoubtedly will follow. The stains on my own hands are light in comparison to his, my haul being moderate so far this year as to barely cover the surface of a large soup plate which holds them now on my kitchen table. He must have bags full. But I know the threat of the squirrel too; the mess of husks ripped, torn, shredded and discarded, scrunching underfoot as I walk down the garden under the tree’s canopy of quick-falling leaves. We leave the rake out, leaning on the shed, so we can tidy up a little at a time, and often, until the tree is bare.

The man and I shyly compare stories of our walnut harvests as he packs a loaf of bread and some tinned sardines into an already overflowing much-used carrier, he hesitates to add the bunch of bananas, they being the least accommodating of items when a small space is all that’s left to be filled, and lays them loose instead, directly in his trolley. More items roll along on the conveyor, rasping as it does with the effort, drowned out momentarily by the ear-shattering clatter of an empty stock-cage being dragged off the shop floor and into the warehouse, like a prolonged explosion of overhead thunder, being so everywhere for a second, and then vacuous in its sudden vanishing. Our shoulders have tensed with the aural onslaught, they then sink with a mirrored arc of an eyebrow, a shake of the head, a glimpse of eye contact with whichever human being is nearby, having shared and survived the ride of that particular wave.

The till beeps as I scan each item, the metronome to a soundscape that is full, familiar, alien. The environment dulls the senses because it exhausts them, stretches each to their extremes of use. I find the man’s black-stained fingers a comfort. I shrug off my self-consciousness for my own ‘dirty’ fingers and rest within their honesty, their story, my authenticity.