On Ash Street the chestnut trees by the creek all let go at once and there is a steady rain of hard fruit the size of tennis balls. People move their cars. On windy days my children and I hear the nuts falling from our house and we amble down the street and watch from a safe distance as the heavy green nuts leap from the trees. We take home handfuls and rot off the fruit and burnish the lovely brown nuts and my young sons throw them at each other and at their sister until I insist on desist and put the boys to bed but not the sister who is a teenager and so never sleeps. I work the nuts through my fingers like fat oily coins and consider the parallels between chestnuts and children. Both are wrapped in soft pebbly skins. Both have stubborn centres. Both gleam when polished. Both are subject to being crushed by cars. Both are subject to rot. Crows are fascinated by both. I watch the gangs of crows flare and hammer and bicker and chortle among the shards in the street and then go kiss my sons and nod to my daughter, who deigns, for once, to nod back.
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Ash Street bisects a hill named for a man who was born in County Clare in Ireland. He took ship to America and landed in New York and walked to Nebraska where he joined that state’s Second Cavalry Regiment and fought in the Civil War and then walked to Oregon, where he lived on our hill until the day he died. He was a stone mason. He died about noon, with a chisel in his hand.
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Holy place in my house on Ash Street: The infinitesimal indent made by ten years of left hands as woman and man and children lean against the wall while adjusting the thermostat with their right hands.
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Down Ash Street on our side lives the crazy lady, who occasionally walks through our back door and into our kitchen and stays for a long time, talking loudly. She tells the neighbours that her husband is travelling on business when actually he left ten years ago. Recently she leased her house to a young couple, telling them that she was moving to Egypt, but she has yet to leave, and is still living in the basement. They are puzzled and walk down the