January 2024
At this time of year, I embrace the idea of a fresh start. Like so many folks, I like to create a list of goals, plan smarter strategies to stay on track, and find ways to spend time with people, books and activities that will enrich my life. Intentions that will fill the calendar days.
As you know, I am in the early stages of a second book and want to get serious with that project in 2024. To kick off the year, I intended to use New Year’s Day for research on Mother Jones, the labor organizer who played a part in the early 20th century mine wars in West Virginia. A book from the library lay on my desk, all ready to go. But before I could get started, the universe must have thought I needed to be humbled, because it sent a reminder that entirely unanticipated things will happen and they will intrude on my plans. This time, the intruder was an exploding chestnut.
Just before Christmas, Andrew and I decided to roast chestnuts, a first for us. Unlike the fictional people memorialized by Nat King Cole in his Christmas song, we don’t have an open fire for roasting chestnuts. Our fireplaces are ornate marble, c. 1850, and they aren’t safe to use. For roasting anything, we use the oven.
The technique for roasting chestnuts is to soak the nuts in water, incise an X at the base of each shell, then roast for 25-30 minutes. Chestnuts from Italy have husks that peel more easily than those from China, but even those preferred specimens need soaking and incising.
We followed the simple steps, put the chestnuts in the oven and looked forward to warm chestnuts at cocktail time. About 20 minutes later, a gunshot sound came from inside the oven. Looking in, we saw chestnut debris sprayed over the walls of the oven, on the rungs of the oven racks and on the interior light. As the remaining nuts roasted for 10 more minutes, the slightly chewy meat of the now-exploded chestnut hardened wherever it had landed on the oven’s interior surfaces. And it remained there for a week, intact, as we celebrated Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and traveled to Vermont to see our son and daughter-in-law. After which we could no longer put off cleaning the oven.
We do not have a self-cleaning oven. We use Easy-Off, thinking not too hard about its noxious ingredients, but when I extracted the can from under the kitchen sink, only a slight dribble came from the nozzle. Both the grocery store and hardware store in our neighborhood were sold out, and a few days passed before I got to another hardware store where it was in stock. Back at home, I laid newspaper on the floor and went to fetch my rubber gloves, but they were nowhere to be found. That meant another trip to the hardware store, with New Year’s Eve bearing down. By the time I was finally ready to clean, it was New Year’s Day, the day I intended to learn about Mother Jones, but she had to wait. Instead, I sprayed the oven’s interior, closed the door, took the racks outside and sprayed them on the deck, waited two hours, wiped everything thoroughly, then wiped again.
An exploding chestnut is not the only thing that kicked off our year. We also changed batteries in our ceiling-mounted smoke detectors. It’s an annual chore for us and we like to do it on January 1, when the fresh start mentality has hold of us. If you think that batteries don’t need to be changed yearly, you’re probably right. But you haven’t lived through a night when Eversource cuts the power and you realize, too late, that you haven’t changed the batteries in a long time and now they are too old to supply auxiliary power. When all the detectors go off in the middle of the night, and you don’t have a supply of new 9 volt batteries, you quickly vow to change them often, even too often. And when a chestnut explodes in your oven, you vow to cut a deeper X next time.
So now, new batteries are installed, the oven is very clean, and January has many days remaining for me to catch up on my goals. But more importantly, I have been reminded that we are subject to whatever the universe decides to deliver. Compared to what can happen, and is happening in the world, an exploding chestnut is nothing.
May you meet your goals, whatever they may be, in good health and in the company of family and friends.
