My Dad and Pinon Nuts

Small snaps of my life

The thought crossed my mind of my Dad eating his Pine Nuts. These were not just any kind of Pine Nuts these were very special in the shells lightly roasted with the most amazing Pinon flavor certainly not like those you might buy in a grocery store today Pinon Nuts. They had flavor like a $400.00 truffle at Wegmans in the City, just different.

My Dad treated his Pinon Nuts as if they had cost $400.00 a quarter ounce. He would hide them in a sock in his closet. My sister and I had two very bad habits. We would tear the living room furniture apart looking for change that would fall out of his pockets AND, worse than that, we would sneak into his Pinon stash. We would only take a very few not enough to fill the palm of your hand not even enough to know you had really eaten a thing but. . .there was nothing better in the world and we knew he would know if we got greedy.

It wasn't until he became very ill and was ready to pass on at Christmastime when he told me that he always knew what we had done but that it was a part of a game that he played with us. He would laugh to himself but never said one word about our little escapades.

We would drive into the Mountain area near Los Angeles, the foothills, actually, to a place called Bouquet Canyon. This was near the place where the Pinon grew and we would take coffee cans to scoop them off of the ground as fast as we could because he would constantly tell us to keep going . . .we need a lot to take home with us. These would last a year until the frost popped them off of the trees once again.

I think this is hilarious and so sweet. By the way, it was a very clean sock, too.