To the Editor:

I never met my Great-Great Uncle Luther, but my mother recalls visiting him in the home on Maple Avenue that he shared with Aunt Margaret. Luther was quiet and reserved.

She often found him sitting outside, bribing gray squirrels with peanuts. The squirrels would crawl right up to him and nibble out of his hand — the one with the missing finger, an accident from when he served in the Ambulance Corps in the Great War.

But Luther’s offerings weren’t purely acts of kindness. He presented such gifts only if the squirrels traded with him a black walnut or butternut. As a child, my mother thought this both curious and astounding. She never did find out what he did with all the walnuts.

It will be 20 years this June that my husband and I have called Uncle Luther and Aunt Margaret’s house home (James E. and Rena Kirk before them), and we now know why Luther sat so patiently trading peanuts.

It took one wet autumn 10 years ago when we were prevented from mowing the meadow, allowing all the nuts buried and forgotten by the squirrels to grow the following spring. Though native to the northeast, black walnuts contain a chemical which is toxic to many plants growing in their vicinity. What began as a wildflower meadow and orchard quickly transformed into a black walnut grove, threatening surrounding species as well as the sledding hill.

It’s taken us five years but at last we’ve subdued the walnuts, retaining only the biggest trees to provide shelter for the birds and food for the squirrels, until the process begins anew. We saved the severed trunks to use as fence posts, the branches for kindling, the hulls for dyeing.

The snows came early this year, the sledding hill is a canvas of stark white with not a single stump or sucker to be seen. Soon we hope it will be covered with boot prints, snowshoe tracks, sled trails, and cross-country ski paths, zigging and zagging over the white meadow. Here is our annual invitation to our neighbors to continue the 50-year tradition of sledding on Kirk Hill.

Jen O’Connor and Eric Krans

Altamont

Editor’s note: The letter writers live at 167 Maple Ave.