But just as the leaves were starting to flare up with color, Daddy came home with a heavy flour sack slung over his shoulder. When he heaved it to the floor and let Mama peek inside, she let out a gasp. “Chestnuts!” she cried. “Where on earth—” Daddy laid open the bag for me to look, too. “We were over near Free Union, cutting down trees dying from blight to sell for pulpwood for making paper,” he told us. “We’d been cutting all day and it was almost quitting time when we came over the ridge and ran into the biggest chestnut you ever seen, near six feet across. It was dead mostly, except for a couple old branches that still had all the leaves on ’em, and when you looked up, you could see they was just full of burrs with the nuts still inside, just hanging there . . . too high to reach.” While Daddy talked, I scooped up handfuls of the smooth brown nuts and let them rattle back down in the pile. They let off a smell that was dark and rich and reminded me of being little again, when it was my job to stomp on the stickery burrs until the chestnuts came free.
