Sometimes as you’re coming through the orchard in late September or early October, just before the bulk of the main varieties are ready for harvest, you get a sense of just what it is you are doing out here. Morning or afternoon sunlight filters at low angles through the trees. The nuts shine in the daylight, having grown fat and lime green with the summer. The shucks are opening. You can smell the acrid scent of ripening nuts and the tannins in the leaves. You can take a nut from an open shuck or pick up a fallen nut from the ground. The work of making the crop is complete and you can take just a moment to breathe in the satisfaction of this partnership you have with God in producing something good from the earth. There are few better feelings.
Aside from the day you plant the orchards, this is the closest you feel to being a part of it. I like to walk through the orchard and handle the leaves. I place my hands upon the bark of the tree trunks and try to sense the slowing of the sap’s flow. There’s a rubbery feel to the open shuck before it dries down. You look at the ground and notice the clover seedlings sprouting up through the grass. Birds grace you with song and a flutter of feathers. The crows who take their liberties, the phoebe who stands watch, the doves who roost among the leaves. All the work, the money that is spent in service to this endeavor. The sweat, the frustrations, the worry, are worth this moment.
Soon the harvest will be upon us. The trees will be shaken, the nuts will rain down onto the ground. Limbs, finally free of their burden will lift into the air. The air itself will turn golden with sunlight filtering through the dust kicked up by the sweeper and harvester. There will be tense, anxious moments between getting these nuts off the trees and into the wagons and getting these wagons to the cleaning plant so they can be separated from the orchard debris, bagged, and sold. There won’t be time to savor it. And then, just like that, it will be over and you will begin again the business of thinking about next year and the more mundane tasks to be done over the winter, pruning, picking up and piling limbs, burning, planting skips or even whole orchards.
It is this moment just prior to the harvest when you get the most pleasure out of being an orchardist, a pecan farmer. You can look out with your own eyes and see what, with divine help, you’ve been able to bring about on the land. You’ve left your mark. But, there’s more than that. Like the trees themselves, the birds that find their rest here, and the sprouting clover, you realize that you are a part of this place, that it is part of you. The investment of yourself in this place has earned that. But there’s not much time to consider it all. You have only this brief moment in which to savor it, just before harvest.
