The Pecans Grandma Sold in Her Own Name
“The crop was thin again, Mama. The squirrels got half of it and the crows got the rest. By the time I paid the boys, there wasn’t anything left worth talking about.”
My aunt Sherry said it with her fork in the dressing, last Thanksgiving, at my grandmother’s table. She did not look up when she said it. She reached for the rolls instead.
Grandma nodded. “Well,” she said. “Some years are like that.”
She was sitting at the head of the table in her red wool coat. Not her church coat. Her house coat, the one she wore inside now, buttoned to the neck over a cardigan, with a crocheted blanket folded across her lap under the tablecloth.
I had noticed the cold the minute I walked in with the sweet potatoes. The old farmhouse always smelled like coffee and furniture polish and something baking. That day it smelled like all of that and felt like a church basement in January.
While Grandma was showing my daughter Macy where the gravy boat lived, I slipped down the hall and looked at the thermostat. It was the same round brass dial Grandpa put in when they switched to propane. The needle sat at 60.
Sixty degrees, in November, in a house where an 88-year-old woman lived alone.
I turned it up to 68 before I went back to the table. When we left that evening, I checked it again on my way out the door. Somebody had turned it back down to 60.
My name is Amy Castle. I’m 37, and I run the library at the elementary school in our little town in southern Oklahoma, which means I spend my days reading aloud about dragons and telling fourth graders that yes, the book about sharks is still checked out.
My husband, Travis, is 39 and a lineman for the electric co-op. We have two kids, Hunter, who is 11 and thinks he is 16, and Macy, who is 8 and thinks she is in charge of all of us.
My grandmother is Opal Reese. She has lived on the same 80 acres since 1958, the year she married my grandpa, Walter. The house sits back off the county road behind a grove of 30 pecan trees, and most of those trees Grandpa planted with his own hands in 1961, the spring after the bad drought.
He grafted them himself. Stuarts and Choctaws, mostly, with a few big old natives along the creek he never had the heart to cut. When I was a girl, he used to say those trees were his retirement plan, and Grandma used to say he was going to retire up one of them and never come down.
Grandpa died in 2014. Grandma kept the place. She kept the garden for a few more years, then gave that up, and she kept the chickens until the last one died of old age. But she kept the trees, because you do not have to do much to keep a pecan tree except let it be.
Then, two years ago, Sherry said she would handle the crop.
Sherry is Grandma’s younger daughter, my late mother’s sister. She is 60 and lives in town with her husband, Ronnie, who has had kidney trouble for three years now. Dialysis three days a week, an hour each way to the center. I knew things were hard for them. Everyone at church knew.
So when Sherry said she would take care of the pecans and Mama would not have to worry about a thing, I thought it was a kindness. I thought, good, that’s one less thing on my list.