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In the woods behind my house a thousand hickory nuts are going to fall. No one but the squirrels will pick them up. The nutmeat of the hickory is actually delicious, especially for baking, but it is locked in hard convolutions in the shell. I think you need the slow time of winter in order to eat hickory nuts. To sit with a vise and a bucket for the shells and a bowl for the nutmeats and chat and think and pick the bits of nut from the convolutions. I think sometimes that I won't really have tried out slow time until I've gathered a barrel of hickory nuts and then emptied in over the course of a winter.