CHESTNUTS AND POMEGRANATES

 "I've looked at love from both sides now

From give and take, and still somehow

It's love's illusions I recall

I really don't know love at all."

(Joni Mitchell) 

     The technique of roasting chestnuts is incubating in searing heat (scored and covered) and hatching them when fully grilled. It takes time to evenly distribute their cooking, but spending it Christmas early morning is the homemaker's duty as is that sweet tenderness time they come alive for while everyone else is asleep and you're up "building the food fireplace." Using your family-inherited wooden spoon charred in the grain around the edges of the scoop, turn the chestnuts frequently and ventilate them with some sprinkling of orange water, and their perfumed steam will eventually loosen and crack their shells. In the meantime, slice the globes of chilled pomegranates in even halved cross-sections and juice them all into the clearest mason jars you've dishwashed the night before - there's nothing like a home-viticulture of "Burgundy" or "Amarone" carefully filtered through a fine mesh cloth to catch the pulp and encasing comb debris, leaving you a perfect libation so evocatively red in taste alongside your chestnuts roasting. I have since learning to cook traditionalized chestnuts and pomegranates in my "cookbook" repertoire for the holiday season. That's the reason they're available as harvest in winter, for nature's love of us. I have received a few precious shipped-from-mainland gifts from the small circle of intimate relations in my life, I put up a real tree for them filled with lights, I will open the gifts when the chestnuts are ready and have pervaded my cottage with their orchard glade, I will think about those loved ones not with me and fill my heart, and I will glad. I will touch these words I feel for their poems (to mean: their mystery) so I won't be sad. Smoke is coming out of the lid and crackling sound, I anticipated the smell, I turned some more coating and adding a little salt. There's music of course on the radio. In retrospect, I find no difference in cooking and loving - both meet each other through the parallel process in the kitchen and intention you celebrate. When I was a kid I looked at midnight clouds and wondered to myself why I was here, a deep, innocent questioning why, given all the stars and all the black void. I still do. Yet, I had never asked my late mother, who had handed down all these traditions to me, as to why. But I don't think it's not ever too late to know why. Just like hers before back home, I have a kitchen I call my own now. And therefore love is never too late. I'm still here. They're perfectly roasted, they've breeched out of their shells to peel off easy, these beautiful chestnuts are ready to eat fresh off hot, but blow to cool, because Christmas is coming to pass. She's coming to pass.