books, Food, Nature, The Baboon Congress, Weather

Attack of the Acorns

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It was a hot day, sunny with a bit of a breeze. The big pavilion next to Sea Salt was blocked for a family gathering and all the nearby tables, even the ones with no shade, were filled up.  We had a tablecloth that we could have spread out on the ground but we thought it would end up being a re-telling of The Princess & the Pea.  A little ways off we could see what looked like some empty picnic tables, in the shade no less, so we trooped over.

Minnehaha Park is heavily forested with oak trees. None of them are famous (although there are plenty of famous oak trees if you believe the internet) but they provided a nice, cool bit of shade.  We settled in and then fairly quickly realized why no one else had claimed the spot.

Acorns are oak nuts; they usually contain just one seed and can take between 6 to 24 months to mature before they can sprout into an oak tree. All I can say is that the acorns in the oak trees above us were ready to go.  The terminal velocity of a falling acorn from a tall 40-foot tree is 22 miles per hour.  Most of the acorns didn’t hit us directly, but they made a whooping loud noise when they hit books, plates, phones and the tables themselves.  Even though we stayed for a couple of hours, when we got up to leave we felt like we were fleeing from a dangerous situation.

When did you first fall in love?

43 thoughts on “Attack of the Acorns”

  1. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    I was at this BBC event being attacked by acorns. No love involved at all. Just high Speed missiles. Cathy Tjepema and I were nearly taken out by the same very aggressive and spiked acorn missile. Interestingly, the food did not seemed to be targeted by the acorns, only the people. HMMMM.

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  3. Oh, I was in love in Grade 1 with Mike, the older man (Grade 3) who lived behind us. I think it was his two boxer dogs that I found attractive. Then there was Corey, a classmate in Grade 2 who lived near us. He had a beagle who bit me when I tried to lift it into my dad’s fishing boat. Corey’s parents didn’t cooperate with locking the dog up briefly to check for rabies, so I had to get a series of rabies shots.

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    2. I don’t think it would have been possible to lock the dog up briefly to check for rabies. The definitive test involves killing the animal to examine its brain.

      The Minnesota Zoo lost its meerkats to that test.

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      1. They were supposed to lock up the dog for a couple of weeks to see if it developed any suspicious symptoms. They didn’t, so the doctor just gave me the shots.

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        1. Still, if they had locked the dog up and it had actually showed symptoms of rabies, it would have likely been too late to give you the shots. “Let’s just wait and see if anything bad happens” is not the correct standard of care for possible rabies cases.

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  4. I was in love with Billie Behr Kindergarten. We kissed on the corner by my house. In first grade I was in love with Benny Darling (yes these are Real Names). No kissing, though.

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  5. On the first day of kindergarten we had to take naps, so all the kids were required to bring little rugs to nap on. I kept putting my rug next to Susie Stoever, who kept moving away. On the third repeat I was sent to cool off in the cloak room, which was the first circle of hell for miscreants in grade school. It wasn’t a good start for my education . . . busted for sexual harassment on my first day in school.

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  7. Nice segue with the question! I was sorry to miss the gathering till I read this post!

    I kind of liked Johnny Hoffman, my first kiss (in his ten, about 3rd grade), and I had plenty of crushes, but first time it was really love would have been freshman year at Iowa State. Fell hard for David R. I’d been set up with, and we dated all fall till I learned he said he was getting “soo serious” – he and his home town honey were doing this dating around thing, but saving themselves for each other till after college. Man was I heartbroken. (They did get married a few weeks after graduation, I believe).

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  8. the old dale connely bait and switch….

    i remember vicki erickson in first grade.
    a raven haired freckle faced beauty with dimples and no front teeth

    she smiled and laughed and was all any first grade boy could ever wish for

    she reminded me of darla from the little rascals
    she moved around christmas so will remain ever perfect in my mind until the end of time

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  9. When I was younger my parents were best friends with mole and Shirley Weaver. They had three boys, the oldest of whom was Eric, who was my age. And first grade I received a valentine in the mail from Eric. It was an actual full size Valentine from a Hallmark store probably. Not one of those little tiny Valentines that everyone in the class gets. Even at the time I thought his mother had made him buy it but I treasured it anyway. We were friends throughout high school, we became pen pals when he went away to school his junior year. It’s interesting that although I do designate him as my first love, we were never romantic, and I was never devastated by unrequited love.

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      1. Haha. You know I can’t get to the trail from my work computer any longer so I have to do everything during the day using my phone, which means I’m using voice recognition. In a hurry and didn’t check it before I hit Post. His name was Moe. He was one of the nicest men you could ever hope to meet.

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  10. sorry to miss it
    good books

    i was on the patio with my grandson monday enjoying the cooler morning air before it warmed up a the acorn drop began

    i’m a little slow

    it took 4 or 5 drops to get me tuned in to what was going on. he doesn’t get to see enough outdoor stuff with his helicopter mom making sure sun and pollution and scary acorns don’t get him but we did the politically correct thing and simply declassified the acorns from deck admittance approval
    and went inside when they failed to comply

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  11. “Don’t get bombed by acorns with anyone else but me. No. No. No. anyone else but me.”
    Sort of a low level image for original sin, a passive image, the bombing acorn tree. The Tree of Bruise.
    In grade 12 I fell hard. She sort of sashayed into it.
    Then we sort of oozed under the door into it, Sandy and I. Knew it before we knew it. It was all too sort of obvious and rational to be so quick and irrational.

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  13. Yeah, the old ‘Bait and switch’ as tim said. Nice.

    I’m glad you all went the same place I went in my head. Oh yes, there was several loves. Linda, Ann, Pam, Sharon… I’d fall in quick. Then followed them around like a little puppy until the parents or teacher or someone was able to re-direct me. Haha… how silly.
    For Kelly though; all she had to do was smile at me. I’m a sucker for a nice smile.
    In high school I drove past Margie’s house often. Never once did I see her in the yard, but I sure drove by a lot. I did actually work up the nerve to call and ask if she was going to prom. It was probably about 3 days before the dance and I asked if she was going to prom. She said yes, and then I fumbled about asking if that meant she was going with someone other than me? I mean, she barely knew who I was. But I have always liked specifics and this wasn’t clear. Sheez. What a doofus. 😛

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      1. Ha- Good point. No, she did not go with me.
        There was also Kathy. I went to a school dance with my friend Pete and I actually walked over and asked Kathy if she wanted to dance. She said, and I can picture this perfectly in my head, “Uh, no.” But she smiled as she said.it. My heart fell to pieces.

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    2. isn’t it amazing how your brain shuts down when you’re asking for that first date?
      i can remember the habada habada habada phone calls to veiled princesses on the other end of the phone line or at the bottom of the high school stairway

      great adrenalin rush

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  14. One of the guilts of my life to this day is the girl who was a good friend, so much in common. She had it bad for me. To me we were friends.

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  15. As some of these post indicate, it is hard to assign the right metaphor for falling in love. Falling is clearly the wrong notion. Falling is too quick and inconsequential to serve here. Bill suggests we think of romance as an infestation, like getting ebola, maybe. That’s probably not romantic enough. Some romances I’ve know were like a toboggan trip down a snowy slope, whooshing down the hill with no brakes and no steering. It might be nicer to see falling in love as soaring into the skies in a hot air balloon. But, dangit, what goes up usually has to come back down.

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  16. I don’t recall falling in love as a kid. I was more of a tomboy and was extremely competitive with boys. Was a lot more apt to fight with them than cuddle or kiss them. Like Linda, I reserved my childish love for animals.

    Had my first crush on a classmate in high school when I was fourteen, but I am sure he never knew, and he certainly had no interest in me. I was the teen that would never get asked to go to a dance, let alone asked to dance when I went by myself. All of those winter-long dance classes wasted until I went to Switzerland when I was eighteen. I got there before my reputation as the class wallflower preceded me.

    I do recall my first French kiss, though. I was fifteen, and my boyfriend was the older brother of a friend and neighbor. We had been dating for a couple of months, and then it happened. I recall running home in a panic to brush my teeth and gargle with mouthwash. I was in a state of panic. I had had sex education in school a couple of year prior to this, but I was somehow convinced that sexual intercourse couldn’t possibly be the only was you could get pregnant. It seemed like a logical conclusion that there was some other not so cumbersome way of becoming pregnant that they hadn’t told us about. How else did you explain all of those accidental pregnancies? I suspected that French kissing was probably it. I was very worried there for a while, but thank god I never confided in Kjeld that I feared I was pregnant.

    In Basel I fell madly in love with a handsome, tall, young Swiss man. I don’t remember his name, we only dated a couple of times before the romance ended. My reason for ending it? He made the mistake of showing up for a date wearing a red tie and being very stingy with a tip after an inexpensive meal somewhere. I guess the combo of being a cheapskate paired with a fashion sense that I didn’t appreciate was more than my fickle love could withstand. I have no idea why I didn’t like red ties, they were all the rage at the time.

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