Poetry

I was inspired to write this poem after spending four  winter evenings with my husband and two boys, peeling hot roasted chestnuts with the fire keeping us warm. We peeled twenty kilograms of them for a regional dinner we were holding at our small French Bistro in Fiztroy. 

The experience left me contemplating the "frenchness" of this famliy activity. Chestnuts are not celebrated in Australia the way they are in Europe. I didn't try one until I was a teenager, on exchange in Italy. So, the fact that my six and nine year-old boys were being paid the princely sum of five dollars per kilo to help us out was an act of connection  to their father's homeland.

The best way to peel a chestnut (and it is not easy) is to score the husk, soak it in water and then roast it.  It is then ideal to crack the skins off whilst they are still hot. There was a lot of joking, complaining and burnt fingertips. I wanted to capture this moment through words because it is the stuff of  childhood memories.