I feel bad for the squirrels. I mean I am really worried about them. I feel as though they are in for a really hard winter come next December. Why you ask? How do I possibly know this? Well because I am very close to a family who stole all of the squirrels Pecans. It all began in the fall when the pecans began to fall from the trees. In case you don’t know pecans are found in a big round brown shell. My mother-in-law decided that her supply of pecans was low so her and her husband made it their mission to find as many pecans as they possibly could and as result mission pecan was launched at the ranch house. At all hours you could find my family picking up pecans or stealing them from certain rodents that may dependent on them to survive. To me it doesn’t look like fun work. Bending over picking up a pecan one by one and placing it in a bucket only to haul it later back to the house Over those months all I heard about was Pecans. Nothing delighted my father-in-law more than discovering a new Pecan tree on his land, or Williamson County’s land! My mother-in-law often recruited her sweet little grandchildren into helping her, which they were happy to do. While this mission was being launched, everywhere you turned at the ranch were bags, boxes, and bundles of whole Pecans. Fifty gallon feed bags and huge barrels in front of every door and around every corner. I mean everywhere. I have never seen so many. They stressed when it might rain or ruin them. As soon as they saw one they compulsively had to pick it up. Once these nuggets of gold were collected the painstaking task had only begun. They were then loaded up and hauled off to get crushed. All those hundreds of pounds of whole Pecans were now crushed into thousands of pounds of Pecan pieces mixed in with shells and all. So now the fun really began when you would fill up a large baking dish from the overloaded fifty gallon bag with crushed Pecans. Then you would take a small pocket knife and comb through every crushed Pecan, separating the shells from the nuts. Often the nut was stuck in its shell and that’s where the knife came in. Carefully you would wedge the knife in between the shell and the nut until the shell came loose. Fun! I truly have a respect for squirrels those suckers are sharp and hard. I did partake in helping with this task, you know to earn brownie points. However it wasn’t really good for the manicure. Hundreds and hundreds of pounds of Pecans picked up, hauled, bagged, crushed, combed through and separated. Months and months of work and finally… Well there is now a freezer full of plastic gallon bags of Pecans. Yes they have a special freezer for Pecans and well ice cream but that’s another story. After all that work I realized I don’t even like pecans that much. I know it’s kinda blasphemous, but I just don’t. I only use them occasionally while baking, but I think I will just stick to buying a 6 -10 dollar bag once a year for that occasion.