For years I’ve been fascinated by conkers, the seed of the horse chestnut tree, Aesculus hippocastanum. As a child in England, I collected them, admired their glossy covering of mahogany rich skin, and attempted to keep them, whole. Each seed inevitably withered on my bedroom shelf.

In England, on a recent visit to my childhood home I went through old piles of stuff, and there among the boxes of letters were some old conkers, slightly hollow like many a memory. It was an October visit and in my pocket were also a few new horse chestnut seeds, this one picked up outside the Tower of London, that one from the Embankment. The old habit lives on. And that of sketching them. But it was while in a favorite park, Stateside, several decades ago, that I realized the best solution for storing conkers.

This piece was first published in June 2021 by Tanya Shadrick on the website for her just-released memoir, A Cure for Sleep.

**Horse Chestnut, leaf and seed,** *Aesculus hippocastanum,* from my sketchbook

On Choosing Then, & Choosing Now

*

Glossy brown, smooth in the hand, I eagerly housed the conker on my childhood shelf. But oh, the disappointment to see it shrink and shrivel and grow dull. I learned you cannot keep the shine of the horse chestnut.

Two decades later, now a mother a continent away, I sat beneath the chestnut that spreads its shade in the Arsenal picnic grounds in Watertown, Massachusetts. My two toddlers played on the blanket. Conkers lay all around. Holding one warm in my palm, I remembered the childhood lesson and saw a choice.

Keep the seed but lose it, or let it be buried and fulfill its promise.

Beneath the surface, in the secret soil, a seed splits open, one shoot and one root push aside the earth. Give it time and time and more time, it rises and deepens, fruits and shelters, an exponential generosity.

Which to choose? Hold tight to my life, my time, my now, or sink down beneath the daily deaths of motherhood; yet grow and fruit and put out hundreds of hopeful seeds, a rooted life?

For twenty-nine years I have made this choice. Tall around me are the saplings of six young adults: a new college grad, a newlywed or two, a young mother, and still two teens. One, also, a recovering addict and free from anorexia, an excruciating decade of believing in someone, holding them by the roots, tangled in your heart. Things I did not know I was burying myself beneath or would be called on to do.

I keep a photograph of a late fall sunflower husk, a horse chestnut seed, a dry grass head, in my room next to where I dress. Spare, rich beauty.

And now, in the fall of life, near spent, I yet hope to polish seeds of words that shine.

Symbols of Fall, rich with beauty and possible future fruit.

Text by Michelle Geffken, originally published by Tanya Shadrick at A Cure for Sleep.

Tanya Shadrick

Tanya’s memoir, A Cure for Sleep: Memoir of a Waking Life, will be published on January 20th, 2022.

(Non-affiliate link to Blackwell’s Bookstore, Oxford. Includes shipping to the US.)

Amazon audible link by clicking on the image.

“‘The Cure for Sleep’ is an exploration of unlived lives – mine, others’ – and what it takes to break the spell of longing for love, approval, rescue, ease. I grew up in a rural working-class family and what mattered most was to avoid gossip, be respectable, stick to one’s own. It took my own sudden near-death to wake me up to risk, chance and connection.’”

— author, Tanya Shadrick

Tanya generously invited readers to respond to excerpts from her work monthly throughout the past year and published those responses.

By Readers: Stories Beyond The Book
As a former hospice lifestory scribe and ‘writer of the outside’, Tanya has written The Cure For Sleep in the hope that stories from her life will call forth tales from her readers – a fairy-tale idea of one story multiplying into a thousand and one, more. In the year leading up to publication, subscribers have received themed advance extracts and responded with words of their own…