Reflections on a Gift of Homegrown Pecans*

My brother recently moved to a large ranch in northeastern Texas. Before Thanksgiving, he sent me a bag of shelled pecans from trees on his property.

I was touched by the gift. In this era of busy lives and scattered families, it seemed almost like a reunion. Our families were separated by a thousand miles, yet we’d both be eating chocolate pecan pie. On Wednesday, between picking up the turkey, making cranberry sauce, preparing the stuffing, fetching one son from college and juggling cars with the other, I made a pie.

As a baker, this was not my finest hour. I hadn’t realized that the pecans, machine-hulled at my brother’s local feed store, still contained small fragments of shell. The pie, while tasty, was a minefield of tooth-cracking hard things. A metaphor for sibling relationships lurks somewhere in that chocolate studded sweetness. The gifts are unexpected and interesting, yet it takes some work to remove the shells.

*with apologies to Stephen Dunning