I remember...

"On my cornice linger the ripe black grapes ungathered;

Children fill the groves with the echoes of their glee,

Gathering tawny chestnuts, and shouting when beside them

Drops the heavy fruit of the tall black-walnut tree." 

--William C. Bryant

I had to ride my bike down the road past his house to get to my friends house. It was the only route available. Four years older than me, he had salt and pepper hair before he even graduated high school. I suspected he would wait for me to ride by, and then throw the walnuts that fell from the tree in his front yard. At me on my bike. Black walnuts when they were still heavy and green. The longer those walnuts aged upon the ground, their outer husk starting to decompose, the more they stained and smelled when they painfully hit you. Exploding black and green and slimy. Sometimes his friends joined him in this pastime. He and his friends subsequently called me "walnut man" due to this exercise. 

I now have a walnut tree in my front yard, and I still can smell that sting of those walnuts all these years away when I pick them from the grass beneath the tree. 

He is a jail administrator in a northern Michigan county now, according to my mom.

"He was a nice boy", she told me over the phone.