I’m thankful for acorns that fall on the road where I can smash them with the heel of my shoe. I love the sound of the cracking and the feel of the crunch that ever so slightly vibrates into my foot. It requires careful calibration of the length of my steps during the approach in order to land the heel directly on top of the nut and apply the full weight of my body thereby achieving maximum explosive effect.
It is something like the pleasure I get from popping bubble wrap but not quite. There is something more deeply satisfying about this act of destruction. Breaking something could be a way to relieve stress or experience a joyful sense of power that probably goes back to childhood. On our recent trip to the beach, my 4 year old son wasn’t as interested in building sand castles as he was destroying them. But I wonder if stepping on acorns doesn’t touch a particular core memory of mine.
I don’t have many memories, core or otherwise, of my early childhood but this is one that has stuck with me if only as one of the few fables of my youth that I have repeated to myself over the years. It was not a pleasant memory. Simply told, I accidentally stepped on what was either a water bug or a cockroach and it must have been a good-sized one because it created an audible crunch. It was one of those sounds that imprinted itself on my soul like the first time I heard an electric guitar live but, unlike the pure spine-tingling ecstasy of the electric guitar, the squashing of the bug was a disgusting wound to my psyche.
If crunching acorns with my shoe is something I enjoy doing, in part, because it echoes a childhood memory, am I cracking open a wormhole to my youth or am I embracing the wound and fondling the scab?
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