Well, that was a crappy week. Not only was I hungry in Vegas, I wasn’t there long enough, so the travel-time ratio was way out of line. Plus there was the quality time with the Commies, and then of course the outage. This is by way of saying that it wasn’t all bad.
What happened was, we had Wednesday evening soccer, maybe this year’s last outside practice. Walking home in the fast-falling dusk, three grown-ups and five children, they whooped and ran, chattering emptily. We parents trudged, talking city politics and real-estate prices and child-care; then noticed we were alone. That block was lined with chestnut trees, and someone had swept a yard-high pile of fallen nuts, so the boys had stopped to hunt. Walking away, they had their shirts pulled up in front full of lustrous brown treasures, and they talked of selling them or saving them, and we talked of the excellence of the smell of roasting chestnuts on Paris streets in cold evenings, and the disappointment of their taste.
We were cold and tired and hungry but our homes’ warmth with dinner waiting was near and the boys were walking along near us carefully to protect their takings and the autumn sky showed dark between the trees’ branches still mostly green but with colour creeping in. And I thought that this is a time we’ll look back on afterward, this is a day we’ll mean when we say those were the days.
