Each year at Christmas my grandmother sends a paper bag of shelled pecans. This year I find not halves but dozens of perfect whole pecans, naked and golden brown, surely impossibilities with shells so hard and flesh so soft.
When I was a child, pecans were the only nuts my hands could crack, and as the sweet meat broke anointed into bits on the plate, I relished it crumb by crumb.
Let peal the trumpets! Bring the Christ child frankincense, myrrh, and these pecans— true miracles in their own right; but I wonder at the powers that send such fragile beings forth into the world quite whole, when they are best savored broken.
