Pecan Horders

So outside the building I work in here in Commerce, there are several pecan trees. Because the school spent thousands of dollars this summer installing a sprinkler system in the lawn outside, these trees have been watered all summer and the pecans that have been falling from them are HUGE! Because I've been toying with this raw food detox diet, and part of that diet includes recipes where you can use pecans, I decided to start picking them up...I eventually got about 7 pounds of pecans!~ I was super excited given how expensive pecans are in the store.

Then the pecan hoarders started showing up outside the building. At first it was this little old man with a plastic grocery stack who was obviously just getting a few pecans for him and his little wife to make pecan pies with. Then the people with long poles to knock the pecans out of the trees and buckets to put them in started showing up! They were stealing my pecans!

All this reminded me of my grandmother. She had this huge pecan tree in her back yard when we were growing up. In the 90's, when she started showing more signs of her Alzheimer's, she called my Mom one day and said that my brother, his wife, and "That Mexican" were on her roof stealing her pecans. It really upset her! We were able to talk her out of calling the police, and my Dad and the man who worked for him had been up there picking up pecans, but no one had been on her roof. It's become a sort of shorthand in our family when we say "They're stealing our pecans!"

Not long after that incident, my parents went to the Lion's club stew. They were going to bring my grandmother a bowl of stew and a piece of pie. As my Mom picked up a piece of pecan pie, my dad said, "Are you sure you want to bring her a piece of pecan pie?" I think she ended up getting buttermilk...we didn't want to start all that up again!!