It’s autumn, and leaves and the temperature aren’t the only things falling.

Lately, I’ve found myself up to my, er, um, uh, knees — yeah, knees — in … nuts.

Unfortunately, they’re all of the walnut or acorn variety. I think I’d rather like it if my rides about town were peppered by plummeting pistachios, say, or macadamias. Lightly salted, if you please.

But, no, mere walnuts and acorns clutter my path.

Full disclosure here: I’m not a big fan of nuts. Oh, I like a toasted almond, or a honey-roasted peanut here and there, or maybe a small handful of cashews. But I can’t stand pecans or walnuts. Nothing ruins a good brownie like a walnut.

That said, there’s all sorts of stuff on our streets I wouldn’t like to eat, so my dislike of walnuts is not just one of palatability.

On my bike, I don’t like walnuts because they’re messy and dangerous. Messy I can live with, but on more than one occasion, I’ve hit a walnut just right with my front tire and just about ate it. The pavement, that is, not the foul nut.

I have to admit, though, I like the sound they make, a gunshot report, when the big iron — cars and trucks — roll over ’em in the driveway of my son’s elementary school. Serves ’em right.

Acorns are another matter.

I rather like the sound they make — a satisfying pop — even under the puny weight of my bike tires. Rolling through certain oak-lined neighborhoods sounds a bit like a string of firecrackers going off (not that I’d know; ‘works are illegal in town, and I’m nothing if not a law-abiding citizen).

The other good thing about acorns is they can make awesome projectiles. I’ve heard stories about how some pro cyclists like to “shoot” rocks at each other by rolling over them just right on training rides.

My ability to launch acorns underwheel isn’t quite so honed, but I frequently send the slippery tree seeds whizzing off into the distance without meaning to. Inadvertently, I pinged one off a car at my son’s school, and I half expected an incident, but the driver seemed not to notice.

It was an accident, I swear, though I have to admit I would have been amused to have had to swap insurance information over a wayward nut.

And speaking of wayward nuts … that’s the other thing I like about nut season. Riding home in the middle of the night, it’s always a charge to have the silence broken by the sound of falling nuts pinging off cars and windows and what-have-you.

I’m not sure if squirrels are nocturnal and the little tree rats are bombarding ground targets or if it’s just a case of acorns getting dislodged by the breeze.

Regardless, riding through the nut rain makes those middle-of-the-night commutes just a little more interesting.