A nostalgic sign of the season

It’s a sure sign that fall is falling when “We Buy Pecans” signs begin to appear in front of feed ’n’ seed and little grocery stores across south Louisiana. For me, the signs trigger several bits of nostalgia.
The first is that the biggest pecan tree in our yard served in my youth as The Treehouse Tree. On some days my little platform built among its branches was Tarzan’s jungle lair; on other days it was the home of John Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson. On days when I was feeling especially brave (or mischievous), I raided the clothes line for sheets to tie in the tree’s branches as sails for Jean Lafitte’s pirate ship (something that really delighted my mother).
The second bit is that the big tree, and several smaller ones in our yard and my grandparent’s yard next door, provided my Christmas money each year.
I’ll bet I crawled twenty miles after school each fall, picking up pecans by the grocery sack full. These were emptied into the biggest cardboard box that I could scrounge from behind Swice’s General Mercantile—one that a washing machine came in was really great.
I’d usually have the box about half filled by the time the pecan buyer came by in early November.
I’m not sure of his name—it might have been Mr. Johnson —but I remember him well. He’d lost most of one arm in World War II, and I was absolutely amazed by the way he could sack and heft and weigh the pecans with his one good hand. He had a hanging scale that swung out from the back of his Jeep Woody station wagon to weigh my harvest.
I think the going rate was about a quarter a pound in those days and you’d be surprised how many pounds a washing machine box will hold. I’ve heard that a mature pecan tree can produce a hundred pounds of nuts each year, and that seems to be about right.
Some time ago I ran across a note in a brochure promoting south Louisiana agriculture that pecans were an excellent crop here and that “Charles G. Larrabee … has a fine pecan orchard upon his farm, one tree of which last year netted him over $100, and he also has a tree thirteen years old that gave him $65 worth of nuts.”
I wasn’t in that league; I’d get $20 to $25 for what I picked up each year—still a lot of money for a kid.
The first thing I would do after Mr. Johnson peeled my pay off the roll he carried in the pocket of his khaki shirt was to hit the neighborhood drug store for a major comic book haul. But then it was straight to Kress’s Five & Dime to pick out Christmas presents for the family.
Another bit of nostalgia has to do with shelling the pecans for my grandma’s fruitcakes and my granddad’s pralines. We used a cast iron cracker that screwed to the table. One end of it was a fixed, circular piece of metal, indented so that the point of a pecan would fit into it. The other end had a similar head, but slid up and down a bar when you pulled a lever.
The movable part pushed the pecan into the immovable part and cracked the pecan shell. Then the meat had to be picked from the cracked shell. It was something of a challenge to get just the right tension in the cracker so that the shell broke but the meat stayed whole.
The other challenge was to get through a whole pecan season without crushing your thumb in the cracker. I invariably had a bruise-blackened thumbnail by the end of October.
My grandmother’s general rule was that it takes about three pounds of pecans in the shell to turn out one pound (about four cups) of pecan meat.
The folks at the home extension office say it takes only about two and a half pounds in the shell, but Mammaw had seen me work. She knew that three pounds of crackin’ involved at least a half pound of eatin’.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.