I was surprised to see a few Osage oranges still clinging to the trees I pass most days on my dog walk. They're all shriveled up and brown now, but they haven't fallen to the ground.
I wonder if that means they're duds, because there's no way they can scatter their seeds hanging on the tree. Or maybe it's just one of those things that happen for no apparent reason. Most of the pods drop, but some don't--or at least not until they're all dried up and useless.
I love Osage orange trees and wish I had a windbreak of them. They're exceedingly sturdy trees that can survive just about any conditions. In the old, old days--before the invention of barbed wire--farmers used to plant them for fencerows because their short, stout thorns kept cattle and horses where they were supposed to be. "Horse high, bull strong and hog tight" is how they were described. But they had to be aggressively pruned to keep the growth bushy and the thorns down where they'd do some good. Otherwise they'd grow just like any other trees and the thorns would soon be up above the heads of the animals they were supposed to deter.
Plains Indians supposedly loved them because their wood made great bows, better even than yew trees. They allegedly ate the fruit, but that's highly unlikely. The seeds are edible, but they're in the every core of the oranges and difficult to get at.
Old people say they repel spiders, but the young 'uns laugh at that. But like a lot of folk wisdom, there is a kernel of truth in it. The Osage oranges emit a chemical that spiders find disagreeable. There's at least one company that makes a spider repellant spray that contains the same chemical. It's not toxic to us or the spiders.
A couple of years ago I decided to I wanted some for the house, garage and barn, so on one of our walks I strapped on my big external frame pack and broke forty or fifty yards of trail up to where the trees are. I jammed as many as I could into the pack--forget the final count, but I think it was somewhere between thirty and forty--and headed back to the truck.
Damn things were a lot heavier than I thought they'd be and I slipped just as I was getting ready to jump a ditch and fell down. I was like Randy in A Christmas Story when he fell in the snow--I couldn't get up. Somehow I managed to get the pack off, get to my knees, then get the pack back on.
That was the longest half mile back to the truck. I was wet, muddy and sore, but I had my spider repellers.
When I walk by in the fall and see the trees covered in bright-lime balls I get the urge to take some home, but then I remember the fiasco with the backpack and just walk on by.
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Woke up this morning out of a nightmare--the TV news producer's nightmare all over again. This time I was in Kentucky, working for a woman who looked amazingly like Jane Horrocks, the English actress who starred in the BBC series The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, which I had just finished watching last week.
As in every one of my other TV news producer nightmares, I was told at the last minute that I had to produce a newscast on a day when I was not supposed to be producing. Let me tell you, producing a TV news show is nightmare enough, but getting thrown into it unsuspecting is way beyond the pale.
I haven't produced a newscast in more than twenty years, but I swear I have one of these nightmares at least a couple times a month. Other people have nightmares about tests they forgot to study for--I haven't had one of those since...well, since before I started producing newscasts in the early 80s.
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It's snowing again--hard. It's a storm this time and it's gonna dump 3-6 inches on us between now and Friday morning. Then the lake-effect snow machine is gonna fire up again and we could get another 6 inches. This isn't a nightmare, it's a daily assault.
Sucks to be us.
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