Les Chastaignes

In Screen Saver the annual cycle of the chestnuts plays a major role. If the book were a novel the chestnuts would be one of the characters, and a complex one at that. But that annual cycle is not a phenomenon confined solely to the United States. That phenomenon also occurs every year in France. It occurs in le Jardin du Luxembourg. And le Jardin also plays a major role in Screen Saver. And like the chestnuts in America, le Jardin would be a character if the book were a novel. But there are significant, and beautiful, differences between French and American chestnuts. And a description of that beauty would have been an important, if tiny, addition to the text of the book. Those words did get written, but they didn't get included. So, blogs being the ultimate menders of all things needing fixing, those words are offered here.

They were horse chestnuts but their flowers were pink. They were not creamy-tan like their American cousins. They had the same dark maroon throats, but the rest of the petals were of an intensely pink brilliance that when seen seemed impossible to describe and equally impossible to ignore. In spring their vertically pruned branches formed huge spatulate palates spattered liberally with foaming globs of their intense dark pink flowers. The spinal paths of the center of le jardin were lined with them. They marched down from just beyond l'orangerie all the way to the formal orchards where in autumn the persimmons shouted out with their joyous deep orange in contrast to their barren, winter-scoured limbs.