Hard Labor

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

I used to know the location of virtually every horse chestnut tree between Provo and Kaysville, Utah.  A weird expertise, I admit, but eccentricity is my husband’s—and by extension—my specialty. Full grown horse chestnut trees produce spectacular flower clusters from which come golf-ball sized, sharp, spine-covered burs. When cracked open, the husks reveal a satin smooth, fat brown nut–hundreds, sometimes thousands of them from every tree. Most of the folks I ran into over the years who had these trees in their yards loved them in the spring and hated them in the fall. Though they are quite beautiful, their fruit is poisonous (unlike the chestnut variety we “roast over an open fire” at Christmas).

Through a tenuous connection with close friends across the street, my husband found a couple in Southern California who had a small company which manufactured Christmas wreaths from all natural materials. They needed a dependable source of horse chestnuts because most Californians were apparently too savvy to plant trees which required so much yearly clean up. My visionary spouse immediately saw the future–local Utah laborers (our children) becoming the supply-side chain.

Because he was a high school teacher and vastly underpaid, my husband jumped at the chance for a “side jo” and began varying his route to work so that he could map horse chestnut trees in the avenues above the Utah Capitol. Then one lovely fall afternoon, we loaded the kids (the youngest was two at the time), dozens of work gloves, lots of 5 gallon buckets, and a cooler of ice water into our VW van and headed out to make our fortune. The teen-age workers were dubious about this plan, but they knew their father was unlikely to be deterred, so they sighed and went along for the ride.

When we knocked on the door of the first tree owners, they turned out to be elderly and were thrilled that someone wanted to clean up the mess from hundreds of spiny husks and nuts littering their front yard. Every kid was assigned a bucket and gloves (to protect soft fingers from the nasty spines). The younger kids picked up nuts already separated from their shells, and the older ones dealt with the harder to manage nuts still encased in their husks.

We swept through three or four yards that first day. Even the two year-old managed to collect a gallon or so of nuts. My husband was elated! Fame and fortune awaited! But his older children were less thrilled. They threatened revolt unless he agreed to some labor concessions—namely a set payment per cubic foot of saleable nuts. Their father hemmed and hawed. But they didn’t belong to his gene pool for nothing. Eventually he gave in and agreed to a percentage of the profits. Son #4, who was eight at the time, said he remembers his share was about a dollar a cubic foot. (Salaries forty years ago which almost matched the $1 an hour I had made cleaning the Eyring Science Center at BYU from 4 to 7 AM before my Doctrine and Covenants religion class!)

Six weeks later, we had ventured into Provo on the south and Farmington in the north. For two or three afternoons a week we picked up kids after school and harvested horse chestnuts until temperatures and snow stopped us. There were setbacks, including six sons who thought chucking the product at each other was much more entertaining than actual financial accumulation. And bathrooms. Eight kids require a potty nearby. Experience and several unfortunate accidents caused us to choose collection routes within easy access to gas stations. Plus, we could all share a couple of Big Gulps—a huge incentive for kids who weren’t used to casual treats.

It was dirty, sometimes painful work. On any given afternoon at least one child rebelled and refused to lift a finger, much less a horse chestnut. And once we transferred the bounty from the back of the car to the basement laundry area, more work ensued. We earned almost twice as much if the nuts had toothpicks inserted for ease of mounting on the wreaths. So for a couple of hours every night until they were done, my husband put on his transistor headphones and drilled tiny little holes into thousands of nuts. Then one kid or another poked the toothpicks in the holes and stacked the completed products carefully in boxes for mailing. We averaged 20 to 40 CUBIC FEET (did I mention hundreds of thousands?) of horse chestnuts per season for several years. And we profited about a thousand dollars per season. After paying the employees, there still was enough money left to finance most of the Christmas wishes for those same eight workers. (A genius business plan!)

Now days, though they live far apart, my kids get their families together at least a couple of times a year. They organize corn hole competitions, mountain bike, laugh, play dozens of games, show off Traeger recipes, complete family or humanitarian  projects, and celebrate significant events. One of their topics of conversation always includes some good natured complaining about their “difficult” childhoods—when they had to spend so much time working together while they were young. I smile and agree. It hasn’t, however, escaped my notice that their children are suffering the same unfortunate fate. Perhaps some of them have realized that was our plan all along?