rolling for dollars

 Virginia displays her walnut picker-upper. It's on a stick, and you roll it along the ground so you don't have to bend over and pick up the nuts one by one. A lot of people in the Ozarks used to sell walnuts as well as medicinal roots like ginseng they dug up from river banks. Most people don't bother with that any more, though there remains a market for morel mushrooms. The black walnuts are rolling in my favorite road right now. They are used for a number of things: The hulls for dye, the nutmeats for—nutmeats, and the hard shell for use in pressed wood or as an abrasive in a process like sandblasting. There are still several outlets around here that will buy the nuts from the intrepid few still picking them up. I think Virginia said the going rate was $10 per hundred. I think she does it for fun, though.