A Walk for Chestnuts

I have the little brown basket over my arm and Aunt Merica is carrying the large one, the one that holds twenty one eggs when we go to swap settings with Miss Cynthia. But we are not going to exchange settings; we are going for chestnuts. All the chinquapins are gone, so the chestnuts must be falling. We go up the kitchen steps to the hard dirt path that leads on the right up to the shed and on the left out to the little house, the old rabbit pen, on beside the garden to the gate out into the orchard.

I like walking this path back of the kitchen and dining room wall of the house, with flowers on both sides, then the grassy bank on the right that Daddy had made to hold back the earth at the edge of the garden and make space for all the perennial flowers: the baby's breath, hot poker, oriental poppies whose seed pods made pepper shakers for my kitchen table set with mud dishes; the so-sweet gray green herb whose name I did not know but which I always sought out to smell, the peonies, iris, all blooming at their time. The biggest cherry tree of all, the one I could climb, was now on my left, followed by the pink grape vine, my least favorite of the grapes. The one on the right that we had just passed, there in the peonies, was truly the best, if you got it right. But for down right goodness, with every bunch, there was nothing like the purple grape vine growing on the edge of the garden out from the shed door, the one that made the shady arbor over the violets, bumped into the shed just above the great door there at the rock step where I cracked walnuts, and then divided and went round the shed to the right and the left. In summer its leaves were blue with the spray Aunt Merica made up and Daddy put on all the vines to kill the June bugs. In fall, in September, when the Delicious apples began to fall, if you looked carefully among the rotten ones and the bees, you could find the BEST TASTING apples and you could eat a bite of the apple and then suck out the sweet, sweet grape and go on eating until you could hold no more.

After we lifted the wooden latch from its upside down L and pulled open the orchard gate, its ungreased hinges squeaking, we passed the pig pen, the pigs now up and squealing, snorting and grunting, demanding the slop they would not get until after supper. Sometimes they were out, wallowing in the mud and water in the puddle between the now gravely, grass-edged path and the pen. Up on the right, climbing up the hill, was the orchard, the biggest tree of all standing down here beside and overshadowing the pen. The apples were small, creamy yellow with red stripes. Maybe, I now think, they were Baldwin, and small because the tree bore so many. We called them the Pig Pen apples. It was here that I found most of the locust shells and watched the live ones come out of the ground.

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© Vivian S. Dixon, 2004