Grandmother and the Blue Jays

Thinking about birds reminded me of my grandmother, Victoria May Paul, my mother’s mother. She loved animals, especially birds. She lived in a big 2 story house on a lot that extended for ½ a  block, and there were 13 trees in her yard, big trees. I’ll put up a picture of her house as it looked when I was a kid to illustrate. The big pecan tree in the front yard was so big you could barely see the house. Anyway, it was a paradise for birds.

Grandmother would sit out on the porch swing, greet the people walking by on the sidewalk, and watch the birds. I remember her telling me that the blue jays would sit up in the tree and watch the squirrels crack the pecan shells. Then they would fly down and peck out the “goodie.”

Her pecan trees were “native,” which grow wild all through the Washita Valley, not the larger “soft shell” pecans they sell in the grocery store. I think the “native” pecans taste better, but you really have to work to get out the meat, or “goodie,” as we called the soft seed inside the shell. You can quickly ruin all your fingernails shelling pecans if you don’t know how to use a picking tool. I remember sitting around the dining room table with my grandmother, my mother Wenonah, and my aunts Oteka and Kaliteyo, talking, laughing, and shelling pecans.

Every fall, when the pecans fell, Grandmother would send us out to pick pecans up off the ground. Then she would bake a pecan pie. If you want a good pecan pie now, the best are still made in Pauls Valley at Fields. My mother said that when she was a girl she used to sell pecans at the “produce house” for a nickle to buy a ticket to the movies.

Back to the birds. In the 50’s there was a column in the Oklahoma City newspaper about birds, and one year the lady who wrote the column had a contest for people to write a story about their favorite bird. At age 81, Grandmother won 3^rd place with this paragraph about the blue jay.

"The blue jay is a wonderful watch dog. He sees every cat and sends out his warning to other birds. They all depend on him for their safety. I always know when a cat enters my yard and which side of the house he passes, because the jay sends out his warning, and keeps doing so as he follows the cat through the yard."

Daily Oklahoman, 11/16/58