I am being oppressed by chestnuts.

The birds are singing, the famous Tuscan sun is shining, warming all the famously lovely red clay tiles, the persimmons are getting fat and orange in the trees, the sea dazzles my eyes at sunset so that I almost can't bear to look at it. And the goddamn chestnuts are falling by the bushel all over the place. One hit the roof of the car as I was driving along the other night and I thought a bomb had gone off.

We have ceded entire parts of the yard to them -- or rather, to their prickly-burr husks that make walking in sandals a dangerous proposition. Mimmo came yesterday afternoon and blew tons of them away with his leaf blower, but by evening, the ground was covered again. Even going out to gather them is a little dicey because they rain down sometimes with such ferocity that getting conked hard on the head is almost inevitable. Death by chestnut would be the most gruesomely Tuscan way to die. I'm surprised the Medici didn't resort to it more often.

We are eating them out of self-defense, if nothing else.

Unlike other nuts, chestnuts don't last long in their raw state (you can't eat them raw, either) because they contain a lot of moisture and will begin to rot within a week. Even frozen (and our freezer is too miniscule to hold many of them) they only last two or three months. It's now or never with the chestnuts.

So we have caramelized them in sugar, nutmeg, and cinnamon and we have glacéed them with honey, ginger, cumin, and a dash of cayenne. And now, like the old Southern ladies of my youth at the end of summer who had canned enough tomatoes to last through this winter and the next and the one after that, but still have a garden lush with tomatoes coming on, we have gone drastic. The ladies made homemade catsup. We are making chestnut butter.

We have tried a variety of methods and flavors -- becoming more wildly inventive as our desperation grows. The best so far (and there have been many attempts) is this:

• Cook the chestnuts (either roast or boil).
• Peel the shells off and sauté briefly (the nuts, not the shells) in melted butter.
• When cool, pulverize in your teeny-tiny little food processor that you drove all the way to Viareggio to get and gasped with delight and surprise to find in only the second store you tried.
• This turns into a crumbly "flour" to which you add vanilla paste, honey, cinnamon, and slightly more rum than you had originally intended.
• Say "oops!" after you glug in the rum as if it was a mistake.
• Blend, tasting and adding more of the various flavorings (especially rum) until it is the consistency of chunky peanut butter.
• (Chocolate and coffee together is another good combo -- improved by the addition of rum.)
• Eat a ton of this spread on bread you bought fresh at the panificio down in town earlier.
• Feel much friendlier towards the chestnuts.