Pecans

I’ve always had a taste for pecans, but when I was living on the coast of NC I got the chance to really develop that taste and for certain I can say they are my favorite type of nut.  There were pecan trees growing in nearly every yard and on most clearings where there had been homes at one time.  The vast majority of these trees grew just a handful of tiny pecans each year.  I was very fortunate though and my next-door neighbors had quite a few very large pecan trees growing in their yard.  They were remodeling the house that sat on the lot slowly by themselves and thus were not living there and would not be for quite some time.  The major difference between these trees and the rest of the trees everywhere else I looked was that the neighbors had several rabbit hutches, and quite a number of chicken coops sitting under these pecan trees.  As one might imagine the trees were incredibly lush and green and were well fed to put out a mast crop like no others that I knew of.  They put out pecans in extremely prolific quantities and I must have been the only person who had any desire to gather and process them.  I asked if I could collect the pecans and they said they would not be using them for anything, and that I could have all that I wanted. 

 Processing Tasks

I commenced to gathering pecans in several buckets I had and soon filled up two five-gallon buckets.  I sat in the house shelling them out into a bowl night after night with every intention of using them for cooking or eating in some way or another.  I soon had the idea to put them up for sale as a shelled out finished product, and that turned into one of the best ideas that I had come up with in the struggling and strapped for cash condition we were living in at the time.  I don’t remember how many buckets I filled with the pecans as they continued to fall through the season, but I do know I spent every night for weeks on end shelling and processing pecans.  Since I love menial tasks of that nature it was absolutely therapeutic to me.  I enjoyed the actual work, I relished the fact that it was providing for my family and it also played directly into my nature that I was using something that would have otherwise have gone to waste. 

For Sale

I filled quart freezer bags full of pecan meat and sold bag after bag with no problem.  It turned into a way to put food on the table in more ways than one.  Not only was the revenue a very needed blessing, but I also kept the pieces that broke for my own family’s use.  I incorporated the pecans into so many dishes, I have forgotten all the uses I came up with.  My most notable and the one that turned out the best, and also, I was most pleased with was adding crushed bits into a crab cake mixture.  I thoroughly enjoyed the crab cake recipe that I came up with and ate them often, being the crab was free as well with a little bit of time spent on one end of a piece of twine tied to a chicken neck in the black water around the area. 

God's Provisions

I am so thankful God provided what we needed down there, not much at all that we wanted, but he always had something up his sleeve to pull out when I felt all hope was lost and the boat would sink.  The pecans were one of the biggest I remember, some of the others turned out to be curses in the long run in some ways, but several others were blessings as well.  I may disclose in the future some of the other means of supporting the family, but my scavenging and resourcefulness was put to the ultimate survival test when we lived there.  Necessity is the mother of invention they say, and there God caused me to invent quite a few new ways of getting through. 

Proverbs 13:11