We have some amazing hickory trees on our property. They are good looking trees with edible fruit. The hickory nut is sweet and I personally think comparable to a pecan in flavor. It’s unfortunately much tougher to crack and mostly consists of shell.

Anne often collects these hickory nuts and spends some time every year cracking and eating them with her dad. There is something very satisfying in the cracking of a hickory. The sound of the splitting shell inspires us to crack more. The hickory nut tastes like inspiration.

This year, I got to looking at some nuts and thought they deserved their own little photo shoot. So I took some pictures and then didn’t really know what to do with them. I could just load them to Flickr and forget about them, I thought. Or maybe, just maybe, I should load them to Facebook and share the hickory nut message with all my hickory friends.

But if I’m going to do that, I better make the messages really blatant and also include disclaimers, warnings and general words of caution (look closely for these). Inspiration is, after all, 90% stinky.