Dad just stopped in, on his way home from a pickin’ session. Grandma only dozes sort of fitfully, so it was a fair guess that she might be awake and, indeed, she was. He asked her if she remembered chestnut trees before the blight.
She said that they used to have them in their yard and in the hog yard. At the farm in Middle Tennessee, they also had some chestnuts, which she called tame chestnuts. She said they were prone to get worms in them, not like the wild ones in the woods. Grandma remembers them dying off, but couldn’t recall if that was in the 30s or 40s.
They used to also have hazelnut bushes in her mother’s yard. Dad said that he didn’t know they ever grew hazelnuts in Tennessee.
She has a great memory. I can barely remember things from my high school days. I hope she gets some good rest. As well as you. I know hospitals are not very good for sleeping; too many interruptions and not very comfortable overall.
Thanks, Mike.
They don’t call them filberts down there, do they? I always knew them as filberts, growing up in Eugene, Oregon — probably from my Mom, a farm girl from Hood River — and was a little taken aback by “hazelnuts” when they came in with a roar via Starbucks and restaurants in the past two decades. Also took me a while to connect the dots to Nocciola ice cream, which I first encountered in the early 1980s at Toscanini’s Ice Cream in Central Square, Cambridge. . . .