It's Fruitcake Weather, Buddy!

Ah, Truman Capote. His "Christmas Memory" has always been one of my favorite short stories. This is mainly due to the fact that I can relate to a part of the story where Buddy and his cousin go collecting pecans for their fruitcake. One of my fondest memories of Christmas in Phoenix is pecans.

We had a huge and very old pecan tree that produced pounds and pounds of pecans each Fall. My mom would send me out a few times each week to shake the tree and collect the pecans which I would put in a 5 gallon bucket. We would sit in front of the TV on Christmas Eve and New Years Eve and crack pecans while watching college bowl games. It was before the days of the BCS so the games actually meant something then. If I remember right, it was usually the Independence Bowl and the Peach Bowl which, sadly, don't exist anymore. Even to this day I love pecans, probably more than any nut. Yes, even more than peanuts.

We sold the house on West Virginia Avenue in 1984. We called Santa Barbara, California home, but Phoenix was, and still is, where our family, and hearts, lived. During one visit, we drove to our old house and saw a painful site. The pecan tree was gone. The new owners had cut it down. It was like losing a member of the family. This house my sisters and I grew up in (our little brother was too young to remember) was the same one our dad had grown up in. Our parents bought the house from our grandparents, Kent and Lavern in the mid 1960's. The tree predated the family even then, having probably been planted when the house was built in 1940. It was sad to think of that backyard, now empty of those nuts.

Now I live in Utah and still I pine for those nuts. But now, I have to be content to buy them at the grocery store. Utah's climate is too cold and it's altitude too high to support pecan trees. Otherwise I would have planted one by now. I honestly believe that absence not only makes the heart grow stronger, but cravings stronger as well. Each winter, as I watch the snow fall up and down the Wasatch Front, that craving grows stronger. Maybe it's not so much a craving as a longing to relive a memory. The Independence Bowl and Peach Bowl may no longer exist and my winters now are by far more colder than when I was a child, but I will always think of that tree everytime I eat a pecan straight from the shell.