I’m a mom, and I’ve got the chestnuts to prove it

Walking home from an hour in a cafe with no children, a chai latte and this book, my coat pocket is heavy with chestnuts. Autumn has come to Bern, the chilly mornings and the Bise - cold winds from the north - send me deep into the closet to find my wool blanket jacket. Boy A needs new winter boots - as do I - and a new winter hat and warmer long-sleeved shirts (Boy C is well equiped with all of A’s hand-me-downs: two children, both boys, both winter babies, the sizes and the seasons are in synch so far). Another autumnal tiding: we all have head-colds, all four of us. But it’s the chestnuts in my pocket, shiny-smooth as I dig my hand among that, that say autumn.

Bern, I discover, is full of chestnut trees, actually horse-chestnuts, planted as ornamentals in the Hirschengraben, along the Bundesterrace, in front of university buildings and blessing garden restaurants with their shade. In the autumn the chestnuts drop out of their spiky shells and roll glossy and brown on the ground, hide under dried leaves or cling to a half-shell. A and I never leave the house without a sand pail or deep pockets now; I scan the ground as we walk and point out the rich brown nuts with their tell-tale white round tops. We come home with pails of chestnuts.

Inedible and poisonous for humans, the horse-chestnuts can be eaten by deer and, if properly prepared, pigs. And so goes out the call every autumn for the children of Bern to collect chestnuts (and acorns) for the Tierpark, our small little zoo. And so we have buckets and containers of chestnuts in the apartment piling up until delivery day on the fifteenth.

This afternoon R left work early and I found myself with an hour or so to myself. I went to a cafe, drank some chai, read some Rilke, tried to revise a poem - which is probably a bad idea when you’ve also got Rilke at your elbow - and decided to walk home. Along the way I bent for every chestnut I saw, filling the pockets of my jacket without even trying. At home I emptied the contents of my pocket into A’s bucket, still loaded with chestnuts from earlier in the day, bringing the total up to the very rim.

Even when he’s not with me, he’s with me. I carry him with me like a pocket full of chestnuts, rich and shiny.