As I've driven through neighborhoods around my part of town, I've seen the annual ritual of pecan picking,,,all types of people, young and old picking pecans off the ground, some digging in the fallen leaves, and others thrashing the trees with cane fishing poles. My mom had three pecan trees at her house,,,one big one in the front yard and two smaller ones in the back,,,all different. She was very possessive of the treasure from her trees and would go out once or twice a day to gather it. And Lord help the squirrel that tried to get it's share of the bounty! She hated the squirrels and would yell and scream at them if she saw them getting just one pecan! It got to the point that she bought a B-B gun to shoot the little rascals. It wasn't that there weren't enough. There were more than she could use during the following year and there were always bags of frozen pecans still in the freezer when the new crop arrived, even when she shared them with her sisters. The harvest would start up slow and she would use a hand cracker every day on the bag she gathered. But, as the pecans began to fall faster, bags of unshelled pecans would start to pile up in the garage. She bought a faster sheller, but the piles kept getting higher. I even bought her a high-tech sheller that used at big rubber band that made it faster and easier. We'd spend hours in the evenings shelling. Finally, in December, she'd give up and take the bags to a professional sheller to have them cracked. She wouldn't have them fully shelled because she didn't trust the guy to return all her pecans. As she got older, I bought her a pecan picker. One of those that looked like a big spring on a stick. but she seldom used it, depending on her hands to find them under the leaves. She never like new technology.