Missing the Fall of the First Chestnuts

As autumn flies by - 30/10/23

I didn’t see the first chestnuts fall this year. In the week when they started I was walking the canal, where there were no horse chestnuts or sweet chestnuts either. I noticed leaves slowly yellowing, the red Virginia creeper, but I didn’t see the first few fall and now when I go to the woods, the floor is littered with empty brown spiked carcasses. The nuts are mostly gone now and the spiky outer layers are rusted, spikes softened by rain and mud, mixed in amongst the leaf mulch. I am sad I missed the first few, the ones that are crisp beneath your boots, that crunch. The ones that roll away rather than being broken. There are a few still, if I look for them. Mouths slightly open, two glossy nuts cradled in the cream but one or two more missing. They are so soft inside, but they can’t be retrieved without a spiked finger. I find a cluster of sweet chestnuts inside one such shell, and pry them out with the help of a stick.

This week I visited my tree in the local park - I planted it as part of a tree planting initiative when I was three. The tree I planted - I think it’s the one, I don’t remember planting it of course, only remember photographs, the story told to me after - is on a corner beside a big old oak. The oak is hundreds of years old, its trunk fat and buckled, bark swirled, a hollow in its chest. Mine - the one I think is mine - is a few feet away. It used to just be mine and the giant oak, but there are more now on this corner, where the path branches into three. Maybe one of the others is the one. I don’t know. But the one I think of as mine, inasmuch as anything can ever be, inasmuch as I shovelled some soil onto as a toddler, visited it through the years and watched it grow tall - my tree has twisted bark. It looks like a sheet being wrung out to dry. It is much taller than me. It has done better at this growing thing in the last thirty years. Its leaves are still clinging on for the most part, but browning at the edges. It is a horse chestnut, leaves like hands. I will come back in the spring when the candles spring up.

For now, I scuffle through the leaf litter and the mulch. The ground is sticky, coated, and those brown, rain softened spikey shells are everywhere. I kick through it all, looking for a conker. I find one, but it is half eaten away. Another has a white fungus growing on it and I put it back. Then I find one - not perfect, it’s underside almost as dark as its top, scratched on one side, covered in mud. I spit on it and wipe it clean and put it in my pocket.

There is a tradition that keeping three conkers in your pocket will bring you luck. There is another superstition that putting conkers - not their spikey shells, but the hard brown nut itself - in the corners of your rooms will keep away spiders. Scientists have tested the nuts for any kind of spider repelling properties, and found none, but people still do it. It is an old tradition and there is something nice about letting it live on, letting the conker keep its unexplainable magic.

But I don’t take three conkers for my pocket and I don’t take enough for the corners of my rooms. Instead, I take just the one, dark and spit-slicked and scratched. As I walk, and for the rest of the day, I clutch it in my hand. Its uneven bulk fits nicely in the centre of my clenched palm. I will keep it with me through the winter, till the spring brings me candles instead.