THE NAUGHTY WALNUT TREE
Donald WhetherhultI went for a walk in the park on a Thursday when I happened upon a young woman I would say about 22 or so sitting on the end of a bench, just starring into space. in wonderment I sat down at the other end of the bench so not to disturb her. A few moments later she turned to me and said,” Would you like to hear a funny/nutty story?” I responded. “Yes, I would, I love to hear stories “She began with, “My name is Eloise jones, this is going to sound crazy but it is true. The teacher and I with 6 other teenage students went to Reggie Bonds a nut tree orchard owner after the harvest season, we requested permission to enter his orchard to pick what crops of walnuts were left for a school project. Reggie gave his permission and the teacher returned to the school for her meetings. We proceeded to the orchard area we grabbed the ladders to get to the high areas of the trees; we found one that had a lot of walnuts still in the tree and decided to select it first. As we noticed it had been hit with lightening at one time so we had to be careful. The tree would sway knocking down the ladders as soon as we put them up, we were thinking it was the wind and nothing else. However, walnuts were being thrown at us from tree we had thought it was the squirrels or some animal that was up on its branches. then the roots of the tree would come out of the ground and wrap around our ankles tripping us, then recede. The branches would move down towards us and swatted at us, Jonathan said, “That is a very naughty tree, I think we better ger out if her before it hurt one or all of us.” after a while we got tired of the abuse, and went to Reggie’s warehouse and called the teacher to just buy the walnuts from him. Reggie quoted the price to her. She said, “I will bring a check over for 20 pounds of walnuts for their project.” Then we told Reggie what had happened to us, he just frowned at us, scoffing at our story, not believing it. We went back to school and told the story to some other students, they just laughed at us, calling us crazy. So, it was forgotten for years. then one day I went back to the tree and observed it. Everything seemed to be normal, I turned around to leave, a walnut hit me on the back of my head, when I turned towards the tree the branches looked like they formed a smile, I left still believing it is still alive. I would call it a naughty tree.