Neither syrupy nor chewy
Tuesday April 11, 2006
If hell has foliage, its landscape must be littered with sweet-gum trees, I’m sure of it.
During the last month, my friend Steve and I filled 15 or 16 of those tall, brown, paper landscaping bags with sweet-gum balls we raked into piles all across my tiny yard.
The source of these prickly, hard, seed-bearing spheres: two trees on one of the vacant lots bordering my property. Trust me, they would’ve been felled long ago if I were the owner.
At some point when we were nearing an end to all the scraping, gathering and bagging of the little suckers, I said to Steve, “I’m still not convinced these things don’t have some use.
“I can’t imagine God putting these here without a reason beyond testing man’s patience.”
Days later, I was flipping through the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and found this news.
So like the mark-up on umbrellas and ponchos when it rains at a ballgame or a festival, when the great pandemic comes—you know, when people are holed up in their homes with automatic weapons and a couple of bottles of Tamiflu—I’ll be selling the seeds from a roadside stand for $1,000 a bucket. See you then!
2 Responses to "Neither syrupy nor chewy"
Apr 13, 08:37 AM
Did you read that the ones on the ground are no good? The author said that they have to be harvested while still green, so you better get up in the trees, and pick them before they fall. I’ll help you with the harvest if I can get a discount on the $1000 bucket. Deal or no deal?
Apr 13, 08:47 AM
Yep, I saw that they have to be green. Gathering with a cherry picker seems like it would be a lot easier than all the raking and bending over to put the little bastards in a bag. Or maybe I could just make it like one of those U-Pick blackberry patches.