Aw, Nuts!

With autumn approaching, some of the leaves on the trees are beginning to fall; I suspect there will be a lot more of that in the days to come. This is a picture of another thing that has begun to fall in our front yard: Walnuts.
We have a very large walnut tree right in the middle of the driveway. It's probably just a little bigger than the cherry tree we used to climb at my Nanny's house when I was very young, much too young to be climbing cherry trees. (Although, many years later that gigantic cherry tree seems to have gotten a little smaller than the Jack-and-the-Beanstalk sized tree I remember as a child. It was as if we were determined to get that cherry tree to send us to heaven one way or another; either by reaching the highest branches to which no other child would dare climb, or by failing to reach the highest branches and bypassing the rest of our lives altogether.) Regardless, it's a large walnut tree. The walnuts grow in oval-shaped green fruit that dries out on the branch, splits open and then drops the nut. We have started collecting them, as the frequency with which they fall seems to be increasing.