Picking Pecans

At the cottage I’m surrounded by trees and plants. My dad has kept a garden—usually several gardens at any given time—for as long as I can remember, and my mom has always made sure that the patio area and outdoor spaces were alive with flowers and ferns and interesting ivies and vines.

The cottage garden is producing okra right now, purple-hull peas too, and the Fuyu persimmon tree is kicking into high gear, spooky orange globes popping out from the leafless branches. And the pecan tree in the back yard . . . I’m still getting used to the idea that a tree will literally rain pecans down on you. Like clockwork. Unprompted. They fall down and you pick them up for free. You eat them and they’re delicious. Amazing.

I’d been picking pecans here and there all week, whatever I could fit in my hands, or cradled in the hem of my t-shirt, but this morning I made an occasion of it and brought a large canvas tote bag with me. I remembered how my mom liked to drive us out to some random pecan tree in a field where my dad was farming, and we’d pick and pick pecans all afternoon. I remember being so bored. I sure didn’t enjoy cracking those dang things either, or picking the nutmeat from the shells, although I’m pretty sure I enjoyed gobbling up whatever delicious pecan dessert my mom would cook up later.

Today I enjoyed picking the pecans. I found them hiding under leaves, still nestled inside their husks, or on the verge of falling from a branch, or just right out in the open on the ground, rolling around, raw and whole and perfectly formed. Into my tote they went. I pulled the lower branches down to my level to bring the pecan tree’s fruit in its various stages of ripening into view.

Did you know that what we call a pecan is actually the pit of a fruit? The fleshy rind of the fruit of the pecan tree, otherwise known as the husk, turns brown, splits open and falls away to reveal the pecan inside. It’s as though the flesh of a peach, the part we eat, would dry up and split apart, and we would crack open the peach pit and eat the seed found inside it instead. In other words, a pecan is a fruit pit you can crack open and eat.

Pecan trees can grow quite tall. The one at the cottage is almost sixty feet tall. Some can grow almost twice that tall. When they’re producing at their peak, you can easily fill up two crawfish sacks with pecans over the course of the season. Standing under the tree this morning and looking up, I could see it was still so full of fruit, forecasting more pecans, even after all we’d picked.

Tomorrow, like clockwork, new okra will have curled on the bushes, and the persimmons will have progressed from orange to orange-red.