Monday, January 21, 2008

www.whiteville.com

By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff writer

I admit, I am partial to pecan pies.

That staple of church homecomings and funerals is also my choice for a birthday cake, and since I had another of those dreaded dates the other week, my beloved wife made not one, but two homemade pecan pies. This furthered confirmed my belief that she is in the running for the greatest woman in the world.

I love pecan pies. Whether the pie is the basic homemade variety (a la Miss Rhonda’s) or the fancy one Miss Margaret serves at her famous Sunday dinners, I appreciate a pecan pie.

One reason I like pecan pies is that they require patience. Not so much to make – the procedure is simpler than many varieties – but patience is required to eat a pecan pie. One cannot easily eat a pecan pie fresh out of the oven. A good one will barely hold together when it is still warm, and can be easily ruined.

Miss Rhonda learned about her husband’s penchant for pecan pies from my mother. Mother didn’t start making pecan pies for my birthday cake until I was nearly grown, but like any mama, she made them with a passion. Of course, the best pecans were always saved out for the cake she made Papa every Christmas. The cake wasn’t finished until a half-dozen of the best pecans could be carefully spaced with cherries around a fruitcake which was never the butt of a re-gifting joke. But to have a pecan pie, you must start with a pecan tree.

Like many of you, I’ve lived in places where pecan trees shaded the house and yard, and know well the sound oval missiles make as they fall from the trees against a tin roof to announce the onset of autumn.

To me the trees are almost as special as their produce.

Some people hate them with a passion; indeed, the new owners of my late mother’s home were quick to cut down the two behemoths that shaded the front yard. With those trees gone, what had been a happy home now became just another house (a markedly hotter house in the summer, I’d be willing to bet) with a porch more decorative than useful.

Nothing shades or climbs like a pecan tree, as evidenced by a tree I used to visit.

It had long since absorbed most of the wooden bench at its base. One massive limb was scarred by the remains of a homemade swing, The tree was at a convenient place off to one side of the kitchen porch, and shaded an old pump stand.

I often wondered how many folks paused beneath that tree, looking for a wandering child, a husband and father due home from the field or the forest, or just to take a break from a long day’s work or play.

A tree like that one is a good place to gather one’s thoughts, a place where one can put the day in proper perspective and thus avoid inflicting our day on our families, as we are all too prone to do sometimes.

That tree was destroyed by Hurricane Floyd, as were many other grand old monarchs; the farmhouse it shaded was flooded and crushed, more than a century’s worth of memories buried under mud that turned to dead, sterile dust.

The fall before Floyd, that forgotten tree on an abandoned farm produced pecans as good as any commercial orchard. I would stop there for a few minutes whilst wandering or hunting or fishing, having a nodding agreement with the squirrels whose ancestors were likely cursed by the home’s original occupants.

The old pecan tree did its duty for well over a century, and still produced pecans a decade after the last pie was made in the wide-windowed kitchen.

Long after the last child swung on a rope swing and the last drink of cold water was enjoyed under its branches, the tree held on, just in case someone might have a need for an old tree full of pecans.

After the storms, the old tree was broken down the middle, its great boughs crushing the house it had once protected. That tree was just part of the tragedy I found that day, but the ghosts of hurricanes past, along with the hurt and the tears that fell in those days, are a column for another day.

That tree and the home were bulldozed as part of a storm recovery effort. The site was scraped clean, and since the river may flood that place again someday, it can’t be used for a residence.

For some time, the farm sat there bare and ugly, a scraped-clean patch of hurting earth to remind everyone of where a home once stood.

I passed by that site again a year or so ago. Sprouting from the now-grassy earth of the old homestead were a few pecan trees. I even saw a few pecans dangling from the branches.

I hope I can get by there next year, when those trees can bear in full. If so, I’ll stop and steal a few pecans, crack them with Mother’s old nut-cracker, and ask Miss Rhonda to make me a pie.

And who knows – I might even be able to take a piece of that pie back to the old farm, settle in the shade of that magnificent tree’s descendants, and enjoy the simple pleasure of a pecan pie.

– Weaver is a staff writer at The News Reporter. Contact him by email at jeffweaver@newsreporter.biz, or via telephone at 642-4104, ext. 227.