I have eaten locally grown pecans in Florida, Georgia, and Texas. Between you and God, the best I’ve ever had were right here in Baldwin County.

That is my opinion, based on considerable enthusiasm and absolutely no laboratory equipment.

One of my favorite places to visit and buy from is B&B Pecan Company in Fairhope, just down the street from Group Retreat Fairhope. I’ve made friends and family across the country very happy by sending their offerings.

It started in 1946. Craig Sheldon and his wife, Annie “Butch” Sheldon, moved to Fairhope around the end of World War II and began building on their property in 1946. The plan was not to build a castle.

They were building a garage, workshop and laundry room, with plans for a Mexican-style house elsewhere on the lot. Before that happened, the family got tired of the apartment they were renting and moved into the unfinished structure.

A short field guide to the trees, the moss, and the particular quiet of the Eastern Shore.

There’s a road in Magnolia Springs — Oak Street — where the live oaks lean all the way across until the branches meet overhead. You drive under a green tunnel, moss drifting in the draft of the car, and without deciding to, you ease off the gas. Everyone does.

It started with sardines. Our friend Alba found a jumpsuit covered in little blue fish — a nod to Portugal, where the sardine is something close to a national treasure, and a country she loves to visit. She wore it downtown, stood under an American flag in red, white, and blue, and Fairhope drew its own conclusions. People stopped her in the shops. People stopped her on the sidewalk. Drivers slowed to honk, wave, and bellow compliments out their windows. It was, honestly, extraordinary. Everyone approved. Almost nobody noticed the fish.

One of the quiet pleasures of the Eastern Shore is how well you can eat here without ever fighting a crowd. When guests ask where we send our own family, the list is short and honest. Here is where to Eat Around Fairhope, Alabama — A Local’s Short List

What Comes From Here — Eating Local on Alabama's Eastern ShorePart of settling into a place is learning what it grows, catches, and puts up. The land and water around Fairhope are generous in a specific, seasonal way, and once you start noticing it, every meal gets a...

The world keeps a running list of seven wonders. Babylon started it — hanging gardens, a bronze colossus, a lighthouse tall enough to see the future coming. Rome headlined the sequel with the Colosseum. We figure it’s time for a third edition, filed from Fairhope, Alabama.

Ours are smaller. Stranger. A couple of them are, if we’re being honest, a short drive outside the city limits. But every one is the kind of place you end up telling people about later — usually starting with, “so there’s this fiberglass Stonehenge in the woods…”

Here are the seven. Addresses and hours included, because half the wonder is actually going.

Around Fairhope and all the towns up and down the Eastern Shore, some of the most memorable meals come with a gas pump out front. As Mobile Bay Magazine put it, sometimes all you need is “a white paper napkin, not a white tablecloth.” I didn’t grow up with this. Up north it was delis; out west, taco stands and bagel shops — places dedicated to serving up one thing, good food. Once I caught on down here, it turned into a treasure hunt: homegrown food, made with real pride, tucked into the last places I’d have thought to look.