Last week, my sister Elizabeth and her husband Kalang came over from Borneo for a fleeting visit. My Brother Charles in Australia told me that I had to take her to a pipi aka shellfish picking. My uncle D was happy to take us even though the pipis might be polluted and the pipis could be miles and miles and hours and hours away.
I said," Never mind, we just want that experience."
Unfortunately, it was high tide, and the water engineer said that there was no way that we could go. So we went to a public park where we saw this tree with lots of nuts under it. It looked like macademia nuts.
When Mum moved to her Australian house, the neighbour had a giant macademia tree. It had branches growing over to our section. Mum and I would pick the nuts on our side of the garden. Dad told us off that it wasn't very good to start off as new neighbours stealing their nuts. I joked about the anecdote of the fruit outside the fence, our aunties' famous saying.
In my school compound, we have a macademia tree, and the school kids look for macademia nuts at lunch time. I have a student J who won't sit still. I go with him to look for nuts.
I am quite confident that this tree with all the nuts lying on the ground was a macademia tree. We started collecting the nuts. We got home and with my nut cracker, I opened a nut and served it to Elizabeth. It was bitter. Uncle D said it probably isn't macademia, and it could be poisonous. I had tried to poison my sister. We remembered a mushroom poisoning incident in the family.
What an experience! We felt "Nuts."
2 comments:
OOPS! I bet that will be a story that will get told over and over throughout the years. ;-)
LOL. What you are holding in your hand is not a macadamia nut. If ir were, an ordinary nutcracker would not have cracked it!
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