I fished a badly crumpled bill from the bottom of my purse and sent in my request along with a note asking the intriguing Miss K to get in touch with me. I just knew she had a story to tell, and I wanted to be the one to hear it.

How hard is it to crack a black walnut? I wondered. I admit I never really considered it before. My only experience with cracking nuts comes at holiday time when bags of mixed nuts appear in the grocery store alongside bags of cranberries, stuffing mix and evergreen bouquets. The rest of the year the shelled and salted variety that come in cans suite my snacking needs just fine.

Little did I know that there’s a vast difference between the English Walnuts in those bags and the Black Walnuts grown locally. According to Miss K, they really are a hard nut to crack. I won’t go into all the details; I’d hate to miss an important step that could possibly lead to an encounter with a bitter nut or a personal injury of any kind. But you should know that you can determine your standing with an acquaintance based on the kind of nut in the baked goods she opts to share with you. If you bite into a piece of walnut bread and it’s sprinkled with English Walnuts and not Black Walnuts, you may want to reexamine your recent behavior to determine why you don’t rate the best ‘nut wise’ from your friend. Who knew? I may have been slighted many times in my life and didn’t even know it. There I was, casually sipping my tea and homemade snack perfectly content in my ignorance of life’s subtleties.

Perhaps the Black Walnut presents us with a lesson about striving for the best and earning the right to savor life’s sweet rewards, risking a whacked thumb along the way. Or maybe it’s just a nut after all. A tasty tidbit offered by nature to those who know how to get to it. A delicious offering to those who have the foresight to live here. I’ll leave that determination to each of you to decide.

“You got taken,” people told her when she and her husband bought their place in Loudoun County. “There’s nothing out there.”

“Nothing but ten acres of trees with a creek running through it,” she tells me her eyes alight with mischief. “Nothing but a place to raise children who would grow up seeing opossum and rabbits and chipmunks at play, where for a time, the cat door granted entrance to some Araucana chickens who lay green eggs to go with the breakfast ham and a rooster who once held my husband hostage on a bad day.”

Hearing that I wondered if a woman sent an extra few dollars in the envelope for those nut cracking instructions if she might be allowed to rent a rooster from time to time. I bet that service could become quite a little money maker for her. (Nothing personal dear, just a hypothetical question, really)

“My family lives in a way that most people never get to experience anymore,” she said. “Over the years so many stray and wounded critters have been in my house I had to make it a rule, ‘If it can’t fit in a jar, it can’t come in.’ And that goes for birds, animals, plants and boyfriends!” she adds with a laugh.

Any regrets about leaving the conveniences of the city? I ask.

“Well, I’ll tell you this,” she answered. “Remember all those people who said I got taken when we bought this place? They were right. I did get taken. I got taken home and that’s just where I intend to stay.”

Thinking of my own home in Round Hill with its lovely view of the mountains, I had to agree with her. She got taken. She’s Miss K, and that’s her story.