A Walk for Chestnuts, continued

The long gate into the wood had to be helped back after the wooden latch was slid back, for the hinges were long since rusted. Then we walked into this marvelous space, a kind of giant upside-down bowl. hovering over the floor of the woods, the floor rich brown, partly covered with some leaves, some small gravel, some small sticks, but mostly just open space. Above, the limbs of the large oaks cut out most light and sheltered half the barn. The hawthorn made a tangled clump to the left of the gate, hanging over the rail fence that wound from the gate, west and northwest up the steep hill that formed a pasture on one side and the woods on the other.

Butting into it here at the hawthorn was the rail fence that separated the pasture from the lane and I knew just where was the easiest spot to climb across. I used it every time I ran from the top of the pasture hill after watching a thunderstorm approach down the valley from Uncle Charlie's: across the rail fence here, across another rail fence into the chicken yard, through the hog pen gate, down the hard path by the grapevine and the flowers, to the top of the kitchen steps and on down into the kitchen porch, just as the rain hit the tin roof of the house. My timing was good; just once in a long while I got drenched at the top of the steps.

First we checked out the chestnut just in the woods, between the orchard and the woods. Sometimes the chestnuts fell inside the orchard and I could find them in the grass. But it was easier to see them in the woods, lying dark brown and shiny on the newly fallen leaves, the redish brown, moss-spotted dirt or hiding still inside their ever so prickly golden burrs. I didn't really like this side of the woods. It had such a strange, foreign feel. If I kept on climbing up the hill I would come to the corner where the orchard ended and our land ended and beyond was more woods going down and up and down and up ridges.

There weren't any chestnut trees on the east facing hill of the woods, the one sharing the rail fence with the hill pasture. But here was where the flowers grew, the fiery red Indian paintbrush, the blue forget-me-nots. Here was my stump that I came to sit on on sunny winter days and count the rings in its rusty, brownish yellow wood. All around were dogwood trees and bushes of the bright orange azalea. There was ivy and laurel; out at Grandpa's there was rhododendron but no matter how many times we transplanted it into our yard, it died.

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© Vivian S. Dixon, 2004