OHC’s iconic chestnut trees poisoned; local merchant on trial

At age seven, my father falls on the sidewalk in front of Orange Hill College. 

Was a chestnut to blame? 

Dunno. 

Christmas, 1982. A chestnut not roasting merrily on an open fire explodes out of the living room fireplace. Fragments shatter a mirror.   

So there’s that. 

The family’s garden centre sponsors OHC’s football team. It has nut-brown helmets.  

My grandfather drinks bourbon in the stands every Saturday and pounds my father’s knee at every touchdown.  

Does the college fight song “Make ’em fall! Hit ’em hard!” as chanted by frat boys and pom-pom cheerleaders mock a once clumsy kid, now a teen in pain? 

No, but maybe yes.     

Then Walmart opened, and the garden centre struggled. The football sponsorship ended.  

Unclear if OHC sent flowers when my grandfather died. 

Still very clear is my twelfth birthday: me begging to go to a football game, how blazingly hot it was, parking in the shade of the trees, returning to the car and discovering dents all over the hood and roof. Chestnuts everywhere. My father cursing God. 

His complaints to the college, demands that it pay for the damage go nowhere. Bet the dean was like, Who the hell is this nut? and the dean’s secretary was like, The nut is calling again! Court records show our home phone number being blocked.  

Later, ivy is swallowing a woman’s garage. The garden centre sells her arsenic glyphosate. 

Did she decide the leafy vines weren’t really so bad, worry that nearby roses or nesting birds might be affected by the poison? Who knows. 

The woman returns the arsenic. My father tells her no refund. She complains. She vows never to shop there again and neither will her many friends. Falling hard on something in the parking lot, the woman sues.    

Police photos show a skull and crossbones on the bottle of arsenic glyphosate.   

Asking as a son who’ll never know, my father—he just blink blinks—being unable or unwilling to tell me through the holes in the glass window in the visiting room: God, did the skull on the poison remind him of a football helmet?