A Piedmont Porchlight Story

You can keep your calendars. You can have your weather forecasts. You can even listen to the fellow on television pointin’ at maps with arrows and colors. Around Piedmont, none of ’em knows exactly when summer ends. The pecan trees do.

Every year, right about the time the mornings start feeling a little less like somebody left the oven door open, the first pecan lets go. Not a whole crop. Just one.

Thunk.

Usually right onto the roof of somebody’s truck. If you’ve lived here long enough, you don’t even look up. You just smile and say, “Well… here we go.” I heard the first one three mornings ago.

I was sittin’ on my porch with a cup of coffee when it landed on old Mrs. Talley’s Buick with a sound loud enough to wake a Methodist deacon during the sermon. She stepped out her front door, looked at the pecan lying on the hood, and grinned.

“About time.” That was all. No announcement. No celebration. Just two words. About time. Funny how nature keeps better appointments than people. The trees never seem confused. The geese know when to head south. The goldenrod knows when to bloom. The katydids know when to strike up the evening choir.

And the pecan trees… Well…

They know exactly when it’s time to begin letting go. When I was a boy, the first falling pecans weren’t a sign of autumn. They were a starting pistol. Every kid in Piedmont suddenly became a treasure hunter. We’d race beneath the trees with paper sacks, coffee cans, and pockets that always proved too small. There was an unwritten rule. The pecans in your own yard belonged to your family. The pecans in your grandmother’s yard belonged to everybody. Grandmothers seemed perfectly satisfied with that arrangement.

Mine certainly was. She’d stand on the porch pretending not to notice us filling our sacks while secretly making plans for pecan pies she’d insist were “just thrown together.” I never believed her. Nobody accidentally makes pie crust that good. Back then, we thought we were gathering pecans. Looking back, I reckon we were gathering Saturdays.

The smell of fresh-cut grass. Sticky fingers from cracking green hulls. The scrape of metal buckets across hard-packed dirt. Somebody’s daddy shaking a low limb with a bamboo pole while children waited below like they’d discovered buried treasure.

Those are the things that stayed. The pecans all got eaten. The Saturdays never really left. Last week I wandered over to see Curtis Pope. He’s cut back on barbering these days, but he still sits outside the shop most afternoons, solving everybody else’s problems without charging a dime.

A pecan bounced off the sidewalk between us. Neither one of us flinched. Curtis looked at it for a long moment. “You know,” he said, “trees are smarter than people.”

“How’s that?”

“They don’t mind letting go.” I laughed. “You’re saying we’re stubborn?”

“I’m saying we keep trying to hold on to July.” He wasn’t wrong. We do that, don’t we? We wish children would stay little. We wish our parents would stay young. We wish old friends could keep meeting us at the Coffee Cup forever. We wish porch conversations never had to end.

But seasons don’t ask permission. Neither does life. The trees understand something we’ve been slow to learn. You have to let one season fall before another can grow. That doesn’t mean you stop loving summer. It just means you’re making room for autumn.

Yesterday evening I walked home by way of the old depot. The platform was quiet. A freight train had come and gone. The bench still sat there waiting for the next conversation.

As I passed beneath the big pecan tree beside the parking lot…

Thunk.

One landed right beside my shoe. I picked it up and turned it over in my hand. It wasn’t much to look at. Crooked. Still wearing part of its green jacket. But it carried a promise. Cool mornings. Football on the radio. Pecan pies cooling on kitchen windowsills. Leaves beginning to whisper instead of merely rustle. Another season, patiently waiting its turn.

I slipped the pecan into my pocket. Not because I needed another pecan. Because every now and then it’s nice to carry a little reminder that life keeps moving exactly as it’s supposed to. Even when we’d rather it slow down.

And somewhere, before another sunrise, another pecan will let go. Some child will race to pick it up. Some grandmother will already be thinking about pie. Some old fellow will smile into his coffee and quietly say…

“Well, here we go again.”