On our family farm in Kansas were two pecan trees, annually producing a small harvest of sterile, uneatable pecans. I don’t know who planted those trees, but a natural candidate would be my father’s father. We have only one photo of William, a blurry image of a man, probably in his early 50s, with a full white beard. According to the hand-written note on the back of the photo, he’s sitting on a porch in Needles, California—a house I rediscovered several years ago when traveling on Old Route 66.
Now, in Georgia, I encounter another pair of pecan trees, a marriage necessary for producing fertile drupes, and gain one more fragmentary image of a Kansas farmer apparently born and raised in the Deep South. When he and my grandmother moved to southern Kansas in the 1890s, perhaps a dream of home-made pecan pies inspired him to plant two pecan trees along the fence row east of the farm house, mistakenly choosing two trees so similar in nature they were unable to mate.
Whatever their history, it would not be long before he would die while plowing a field, a few yards south of those two trees. Were they his last green vision before his eyes finally closed?
~Bob