Chestnuts in the Ash Tree
The ash tree at the end of the street is the same tree my grandmother walked to as a girl, and it is older than the street by a good margin. In the third week of September the husks come down and the chestnuts are there, brown and glossy in the green cases, and half of them have already been split open by whatever is living in the branches.
We gather them in the late afternoon, after the school day, with a stick and a bag and gloves my mother insists on because of the smell. The good ones come out of the husks with a thumbnail and come away clean and shining. The rest have grubs in them, and my grandmother taught us to leave those on the ground rather than take them home, which is a rule we still follow without much discussion.
They roast in the pan on the stove, or in the oven if my mother has the patience for the oven, in a single layer on a tray, and they take about forty minutes and they split open and jump when they are done. You have to take them out before they burn, because the sugar in the skin goes from fine to bitter in about a minute, and everybody in the house knows this and everybody in the house still gets it wrong once a week.
My grandmother's memory of them is from a winter evening in a house with one room and a stove, when the chestnuts were in the ash and the smell of them was the smell of the whole evening. She used to say that a chestnut roasted in a pan is only half a chestnut, and then she would eat three more, which is how she proved her own point every time.