Horse Chestnut

In the 1880’s, my great grandmother planted a horse chestnut tree in the backyard of our house.

By the time I was 8, the tree was almost 100 years old and at least three feet in diameter at its furrowed base.  I remember fragrant spring and hot summer afternoons spent under the tree with my grandfather. We sat in steel chairs on the large slate flagstones of the walk that led from the back kitchen door, drinking water out of tin cups from the stone-lined well a few feet away.  That water, ice-cold even in the hottest afternoons of summer, is the sweetest I ever drank.

We sat for hours, almost every day, under the horse chestnut: a living cathedral, its interior a leafless framework bounded by translucency.  In the spring thousands of bees came to work for weeks on the blossoms of the horse chestnut.  Their drone rose through the morning and afternoon, then subsided and was replaced in the evening by the spring peepers in the swamp across the road.  The sticky-sweet smell of the linen-white and pink chestnut blossoms mixed with the musty decay of the perpetually shaded kitchen wing of the old house and my grandfather’s pipe as he lit another bowl of apple tobacco.

August’s hot summer apex brought utility to shade.  We sat in the tree’s dark coolness and listened to the piercing whines of the tree frogs. My grandfather told me this would be mine after he was gone. Time stopped and I needed to be nowhere.

The tree felt like a protector: strong, very old, alive, sheltering, rhythmic.

But it was gradually succumbing to horse chestnut blight, each leaf edged by brown deadness. Eventually, weakened in its resistance to the disease, the tree lost many of its branches to the wind. The cathedral’s roof collapsed, and I cut its remains down in 2006. The base of its trunk measured 42” in diameter. A section of it hangs in my dining room, reminding me of its peace.

The next year, I planted a new horse chestnut tree.