1 Prologue

When I was a young boy my father told me about the struggles that he had founding our family farm, changing it from the desolate little patch of rocks into the single largest walnut orchard in Sonoma. Also the only walnut orchard, but hey that makes us the best. The story started when my great grandfather killed six men with a taxidermied beaver over the last walnut in Ireland. As the Banshee called his death knell my great grandpappy, placed the blood-soaked walnut into the hand of his son. He swallowed it and carried it in his left lung into the new world of America. Well it was a new world at some point at least. My grandfather used one of his pinchers to retrieve the wayward nut from his body and carried it proudly in his yellowed sigogglin fangs from the port he landed in at North Carolina. Over twenty years my grandfather Hulio McDelian worked tirelessly to make his name in the mining business. He worked his pinchers to the chitin and made sure that his wife Amelia and their forty-seven children would have wonderfully fulfilling lives. My father Angus and my mother Agnes met when the sun was high and the land was shifting under their feet. They thought it was love at first sight, finding out days later that it was in fact an 8.9 earthquake. That tragedy didn't mar their relationship, they settled down on land that was given out by Julio on his deathbed. An arid cracked patched of dirt, the one that is softly turning under my feet as I speak. Within in two years they turned the horrid 11,520-acre wasteland into a blossoming and verdant orchard with trees that stretched as far as the eye could see, farther in fact. The trees go on, and on, and on, until further than should be possible. The trees move and sway, foxes, and raccoons mill through the field looking for their next meal. Thick lush grass coats the ground between the trees and shapes in the distance flow through the shadows in the periphery of perception. Peaceful and warm. As time moved forward my sister Lerlean and I came to be. We've worked the farm for as long as we can remember since the sky was colors that most have never seen and keeping our beautiful, wonderful, terrifying little farm together. Bringing together the beauty of the Walnuts of Sonoma.