Sally Breslin: My Life: I'VE BEEN BUSY PICKING...AND TRESPASSING

I have been obsessed lately with collecting fir-tree cones for craft projects. Unlike pine cones, fir-tree cones are tiny, some not even a half-inch in length, and I can fit about 350 of them in a plastic sandwich-bag.

This year, the cones have shown up in abundance, something they do only every few years, so I’ve been trying to gather as many as possible while the getting is good. I figure I can stockpile them for every craft project I’ll need them for until the year 2025.

So every day lately, during my daily two-mile walk, I have been collecting the cones. This has led to a bunch of problems, several of which I’m fortunate haven’t landed me in jail.

I started out picking the cones from my own fir trees. The problem was, I picked all of the cones as high as I could reach. Every day, I would go out there and glare at the huge clumps of cones about 10 feet up on the trees and wish I suddenly could grow another five feet in height. I wasn’t about to try to climb any trees – or ladders – mainly because I’m afraid of heights, so the cones taunted me every day, calling out to me, “Ha! We are the nicest shaped cones on this tree but you can’t reach us! Good enough for you, shorty! That’ll teach you to strip our bottom halves bare! How would YOU like it if we did that to you?”

But then came the recent strong winds and everything changed. Suddenly, there were fir-tree cones everywhere in my driveway and on my lawn, and all I had to do was bend over and scoop them up. No more leaping into the air while trying to reach the higher branches. No more whacking at the branches with a rake to try to shake off some cones. They were flying through the air and practically landing at my feet! I felt as if I’d just struck gold.

But I became greedy and wanted an assortment of shapes, sizes and colors. All of the cones on my trees looked the same – mainly because all of the trees looked the same. So I decided I probably should collect some from other trees – like maybe from my neighbors’ property – to add some variety to my collection. No one would miss a few cones, I told myself, especially since every tree in the area had about a gazillion on them.

So each day during my walks, I brought a sandwich bag with me and vowed not to go home until I filled it. On one wooded stretch of my road there were hundreds of cones just lying on the ground, so I greedily began to fill the bag. As I was doing so, a jogger came by.

“Looking for old cigarette butts?” he called out to me, laughing.

“Yeah, I’m having trouble kicking the habit!” I called back.

I filled the bag in five minutes, then smiling with satisfaction, continued on with my walk. That’s when I noticed a huge fir tree on someone’s lawn. The cones on it were works of art – perfectly shaped, a nice dark shade of brown, and ripe for the picking. There was no sign of life anywhere in or around the house, so I nonchalantly made my way over to the tree, then frantically began to pick the cones and stuff them into my pockets. When my pockets were full, I quickly walked off the property – where I noticed two guys who’d been putting siding on the house across the road, standing there staring at me. The expressions on their faces told me they thought I might know something about fir-tree cones that they didn’t. Considering how frantically I’d picked them and shoved them into my pockets, they probably thought I was going to take them home and smoke them.

When I got home with my “stash,” I emptied the cones from my pockets and laid them out on the kitchen counter. My smile of satisfaction faded, however, when a bunch of ugly black bugs crawled out of them. I had no idea what the bugs were, but I was pretty sure they were some evil cone-eating breed that was going to seek out and destroy all of the other cones I’d managed to gather. So I shoved all of the cones and bugs back into the bag, sealed it, and then tossed it into the outdoor trash barrel. I felt so upset, you’d think I was tossing out a dead relative’s ashes. I then shoved my jacket into the dryer to kill any bugs that might be hiding in the pockets.

I had to suppress the urge to go complain to my neighbors that they were harboring a crop of ugly fir-dwelling bugs that could overrun the neighborhood and cause a fir-cone blight, but I didn’t want to risk being arrested for grand-theft cones.

So the next day I “visited” another neighbor’s property and helped myself to some of the cones there. They looked great and I checked them for bugs before I started to pick them. That’s when I heard barking – and saw a dog running across the yard, right toward me.

I froze.

Not far behind the dog was the owner.

“Great. I’m going to end up sharing a jail cell with a heavily tattooed woman named Big Bertha,” I mumbled under my breath, clamping my eyes shut. “That is, if there is anything left of me after the dog gets through with me.”

As it turned out, both the dog and the owner were friendly.

“What are you doing?” the guy asked me.

“Picking cones for crafts,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind, but the ones on your tree are just about perfect in shape and size for what I need.”

“No, not at all.” he said. “In fact, I’ll help you pick some!”

I wasn’t about to turn down his help, but he wasn’t a craftsperson. He didn’t know that each cone had to be perfect. He didn’t know I didn’t want the shriveled-up or lopsided ones. He just grabbed every cone in sight and stuffed them into my bag. I wasn’t certain if he really wanted to help me or if he just wanted to get rid of me as fast as possible.

I ended up, after days of picking, filling a five-gallon bag with cones. I sorted through all of them and weeded out any that had missing parts, dirt or irregular shapes before putting them into the bag. So I ended up with a collection of perfect specimens. I overcame plenty of hazards to get those perfect cones, too. I had a snake crawl over my foot. I had a tick on the back of my hand and later found one on my calf. And during a particularly windy day, a huge dead tree came crashing down only 20 feet away from me. I nearly suffered a heart attack.

I also became intimately acquainted with my heating pad after suffering from muscle cramps from so much bending and stretching.

And more than once, when I didn’t take my walk until dusk, I picked up what I thought was a cone…and it turned out to be some kind of small-animal poop.

Then there was the rainy day I was able to pick only a few more cones to add to my collection. I put them into my “perfect specimen” bag and sealed it for future use. I figured I finally had enough cones. No more picking. I was done.

As it turned out, those last few cones I added to the bag were damp from the rain and caused 85 percent of the other cones in the bag to rot.

I would like to describe what my reaction was when I discovered the crumbling mass of cones in the bag – but it’s not printable.

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