Red Flagged
As we took our morning walk around our 10-acre pasture, my husband and I kept a keen eye to the ground in search of Black Walnut saplings that had sprung to life, taking their place among the grass and weeds. It was nothing short of miraculous that even after cutting the grass so many times, some of the new saplings seemed to erupt from their seeds overnight. We walked slowly, taking in the early morning beauty of the countryside, a bundle of red flags in hand that we would use to mark the saplings to save them from utter destruction at the careless hands of a teenager on a riding mower. We would concentrate our efforts in the most obvious places, near other Black Walnut trees that had produced a bumper crop of walnuts last year that now littered the ground. Occasionally though we would find a sapling in some obscure place; apparently the work of some rodent, probably a squirrel. As we marked the trees, I was suddenly aware of the illustration...