Happy Spring Podcast - Show 01

PICKING CHESTNUTS: Autumn's Easter Hunt

The last of the sweetest corn is in.
The tomato patch begins to thin.
The final field of beans comes on.
Leaves careen.

Acorns plop and thud in wind
that cracks the woods in which we live.

Rain moves across the fields in waves.

Because they fall, it's time to pick
the chestnuts where they land.
Like Easter eggs, they hide before our hands.
Their shells reflect and glisten.

We listen.

Before the chest, the hazels drop.
With hammer and nail the hazel's
delicately chipped apart
for the meat that holds
its perfect winter oils;
the beginning of the laying on of fat.

This fundamental commerce
pays one buck a nut
from Mother's grocery money;
makes me again a girl
in my mother's house
where a gentle, persistent order reigns;
the discipline of days in which
one always wakes to watering or baking,
the daily foraging for food
so fresh and close
the roots sing
the names of their leaves
even as they slide down
to return again to soil.

We share the joy of
the coming on of chestnuts.

On day one, a few,
then in the first cold rain
one hundred.

I prosper.

We hold the gathered nuts in bowls.
They turn from white to brown with air,
hardening.

You can't take them 'til they're ready.
Hulls with nails are haughty warning.

Chestnuts.

Boiled are best.
Hot and full of wood & smoke
even without coals.

We tangle with the squirrels.

Chestnuts.

Autumn's Easter hunt.

The Literature of Sound.