In Search of the Wild Plum

Re-posted in honor of the beginning of yet another Georgia summer…

 

Do you still believe in fairies, elves, and leprechauns? Is Santa Claus your constant companion, rather than just a seasonal apparition? Have you searched for, and found, the wild plum? If your answer is yes, then I say well done! If your answer is no, then I might ask why not?

In the state of Georgia, in the very middle, or maybe a bit to the west of middle, within that region known as the piedmont, lies the small county of Lamar. The county seat of Lamar is the town of Barnesville. About five miles to the west of the town, as the crow flies, lies a farm once owned by my family, where I enjoyed some of the sweetest days of childhood. It was there that the following events took place, seemingly only yesterday, but, in actuality, many years ago.

It was one of those summer days not uncommon to the deep South — hot enough to make lethargic seekers of shade out of even the most active of children. Our bird dogs, which, on a more temperate day, would have managed to deposit an invisible paw print upon every square inch of our one-plus acre yard over the course of the day, now lay panting under the shrubbery at the front of the house, the day more than half gone and most of the yard still printless. The grass in the yard was brown and dormant since our well could not put out enough water to quench its thirst, but, then, there was too much to mow anyway. Early cicadas droned their monotonous chirp, the frequency a constant report upon the current state of the thermometer. School was out, and, even though the calendar said that it was not quite officially summer yet, it was already hot. We knew what summer looked, smelled, sounded, and felt like, and this was it.

The old home place had been built prior to the Civil War and, while adequately comfortable, it had seen its best days many years before. It was a two-story affair situated at the top of a hill which fell away to the south into a shallow valley consisting mostly of pasture land and one small pond. On the same side was a full height porch which covered most of that side of the house. Partly due to its location, but mostly because the ceiling was so high, it provided little shade in the afternoon and was not an enjoyable place to sit much beyond mid-day. So we sat around inside, avoiding any endeavor which would require us to move, for to move would serve only to increase the flows of the rivulets of perspiration which already traversed the geographies of our bodies.

My father was not a wealthy man, but he was successful and could have easily afforded some kind of cooling had it been fashionable at the time and had he been so inclined. As it so happened, however, he wasn’t, for he had been brought up in a part of Georgia even farther south and had learned to live with the heat. So his idea of air conditioning was a funeral home fan in one hand and a cold beer in the other, and as children, we got the first but not the second. Thankfully, though, the old house had been built with hot summers in mind and possessed, therefore, the high ceilings and good ventilation which helped make the human condition during summertime in the South a bearable one.

Our driveway was a quarter mile long and terminated at the county road where, in the fall, the school bus would stop. Both driveway and road were unpaved at the time, carved out of the red clay which, when first seen by a young boy who had been away to a foreign land such as Florida, and who was returning, told him he was nearing home. The length of the driveway made the walk to the mailbox during inclement weather an interesting one. Where the driveway met the road, on the other side and down a ways to the left, was a run down shack, now unoccupied, which had been the home of the Mather1 family but was presently only a ghostly shadow of its former self. There was not a habitable dwelling in either direction for at least a mile. If you turned right onto the county road, you could eventually make it to town. If you turned left, you went somewhere else. To a child living in the country, any destinations other than town were just “somewhere else.”

On this particular day there were just the three of us in the house: my older sister, Nancy, newly separated from her high school sweetheart and come home from Boston, my cousin, Kay, thirteen, and me. My father, mother, and I had only recently returned home from a seven year exile in Florida so that I could attend the seventh grade at Gordon Grammar School. The following year I would begin at Gordon Military High School, thereby fulfilling a long time dream. The year was 1961. Jackie and her husband occupied the White House, and Khrushchev stalked the Kremlin. I was twelve.

Because of the heat, complete lethargy was an exceedingly sensible philosophy, but the boredom and restlessness inherent in children are, as we all know, mortal enemies of good sense. Moreover, the wild plums were still in season, and their siren’s song called to us and beckoned us out into the heat. Although the heat was bad, it was only bad while the boredom and restlessness were intolerable.

“Let’s go pick some wild plums!” one of us must have said. Whether the words were Kay’s or mine really doesn’t matter. Either way my sister was against it. One of us had to display some semblance of good sense, and, as the only adult in the house at the time, the duty fell to her.

So, there we sat, a perfectly good idea lying limp as bacon on a cold griddle. Since my cousin and I were, however, card-carrying children, having a combined twenty-plus years as such, we weren’t about to let the subject lie fallow for very long, and we, by the double effect of instinct and experience, knew the proper course to take. So we set about the familiar progression of cajoling, begging, whining, and pouting, separately and then together, until we had worn my poor sister down enough that she finally, begrudgingly, consented to go with us. What we had to do, you see, was make the prospect of an excursion into the heat less onerous than that of having to continue to listen to us, and we accomplished the task with typical ease. Success having been realized, and not wanting to give my sister time to change her mind, Kay and I grabbed some sort of container or other to put our plunder in and rushed poor Nancy out of the door and into summer’s full glory.

So, down the driveway we went, all in shorts, my sister sockless in tennis shoes and my cousin and I in the newly trendy flip-flops. The only breeze stirring was that caused by our own bodies plowing through the thick, stagnant air as we walked along, each step causing particles of fine red dust to rise up and cling to the sweat on our ankles. When we reached the road, we turned left toward “somewhere else,” for that was the direction in which the wild plum bushes would be found.

The road was a slow grade to the top of a hill which couldn’t have been more than a few hundred yards away but which seemed, somehow, much more distant. As we walked along, we passed the shack wherein John Mather’s daughter shot him dead one night when he came at her mother and her in a state of belligerent inebriation. She reportedly used his own shotgun and gave him both barrels at close range. Some drunks get mellow as their state of inebriation progresses, some get talkative, and some get sleepy. Mather got mean, or so the story goes, and paid the price that July night. Now empty, the old shack’s dark windows hid unknown secrets, and, in spite of the heat, I felt a chill as we walked past.

The top of the hill was still a good ways ahead, and, by this time no one, not even Kay nor I, was sure that this was such a good idea. Since, however, we were then nearer our destination than home, we plodded along. I am told that, in some parts of the country, perspiration actually evaporates and thereby serves to cool the body. Unfortunately, however, this phenomenon is unknown to Georgia since we get the double whammy of heat and humidity, so the sweat just lies on top of your skin and soaks your clothes. By the time we approached the crest of the hill, we couldn’t have been any wetter had we jumped into Bunkley’s Branch — something we would have been very happy to be able to do right about then.

Finally, however, we reached the top of the hill, and our destination was just a few short yards away. So, we turned to the right off of the road, climbed a low red bank, and crossed a rusty old barbed wire fence onto what had once been the Mather property. There, in front of us, lay the wild plum bushes. It was near the end of their time, but, fortunately, there were still a few reddish-golden orbs hanging here and there so that we would not go home empty handed.

Now, anticipation, we all know, is always sweeter than the final realization, and, like the woman who has given birth whose pain is soon forgotten, else we would all be only children, we never remembered that wild plums really weren’t very good. They were small — not more than an inch in diameter — and usually not very sweet. What was worse, however, was that it was rare to find a perfectly unblemished specimen. To the contrary, most contained multiple punctures where some bug or other had stuck in its little beak, drinking of the not so sweet juice and then, deciding that this was not, after all, the spot it had intended to drink from, moved along to do the same thing several more times on that, or some other, fruit. So, if you wanted to actually get any fruit yourself, you had to either bite these parts off, hoping all the while that the holes were just bug beak marks and not worm entry points, or carefully eat around them.

In other words, they were absolutely wonderful, made that way not so much by their taste, texture, and perfection, as by the fact that they were free and that we had braved the summer heat to find and pick them ourselves. I may even have been exaggerating just a little about the severity of the bug-beak-mark problem, because we always seemed to be able to find enough relatively blemish-free fruit to eat on the spot and carry some home, as we did on this day, the heat, humidity, perspiration, and dust completely — or maybe not completely, but somewhat — forgotten.

Since that memorable day, many summers have come and gone. Conventional thought tells us that time is linear and, as Edward Hall once put it, “flows like a conveyor belt that moves horizontally from past to present to future at the same unchangeable speed for all of us.” Experience, however, teaches that it is not. Sooner or later, we must all learn time’s terrible secret:  the more it passes, the faster it passes. It’s a law as immutable as the law of gravity, only much, much crueler. Hours become as minutes, days become as hours, months become as days, and years become as months. In the merest blink of an eye, the present fades into the long past, and the distant future becomes the present. So must it happen for us all. So it has for me.

Now, the elevated level of mercury in the thermometer, the dance of fireflies over the lawn, and the fragrance of Magnolia blossoms wafting through an open window all remind me that summer is upon us yet again. Many years have passed since I last had the privilege of picking a wild plum, and, as I sit here in wistful remembrance, I realize that I can’t recall even seeing a wild plum bush since I became an adult. That is, as I think of it, a very curious thing, because I am not a complete stranger to the outdoors, and I do get there ever so often. Have the plum bushes actually been there all along and I, having other things on my mind, just didn’t notice them, or could it be that they were not there at all, and, if not, why? Could, perhaps, some blight or other have killed them off in our neck of the woods, if not everywhere?

Or, could there possibly exist, as a well-known writer once penned, “…a veil covering the unseen world,” and could the wild plum be a citizen of that world? Could it be that wild plums, like fairies and other denizens of the unseen, are there only to those — like children and, perhaps, some lucky adults who have been mercifully relieved of the burden of rationality — who have the imagination to see?

Silly, you say? Maybe, yet maybe not. I believe, you see, that there is such a veil and that it is as real as dew drops on a rosebud, but, instead of being magical, mystical, or mysterious, it is, rather, wholly of our own weaving and hanging. Anytime we walk toward something, we are necessarily walking away from something else, and so, as we stroll toward adulthood, responsibility, and practicality, we tend, also, to walk away from innocence, freshness, and purity and from all of the simple, yet wondrous, things that used to give us so much pleasure. The farther away we walk, the lower the veil falls until at last they can be seen no more and are, oftentimes, sadly, completely forgotten.

Yet, if this be a disease, then it is, thankfully, not one without cure. To children, you see, there are no veils. Every vision is new and fresh, every experience is an adventure, and, if we can only, not just allow ourselves, but actually seek, to see through their eyes and even let them teach us to once again see as they see, then all of the veils which we have inadvertently woven and hung over the years will melt quickly away to reveal once more the freshness, the wonder, the magic, and the excitement that we left so far behind so long ago. If the spirit of de Leon were to come to me and ask directions to that which he sought in life, I would reply thus: “Yes, Ponce old boy, there is a Fountain of Youth, and you may find it yet, though not in the mangrove forests of Bimini nor in the palmetto jungles of Florida, but in the eyes of a child.” It has been said, “Once a man, twice a child.” I do not know who first made the statement, but, if he were here, I would ask if that is really and truly such a bad thing? And, I would ask, too, if, when we look upon an aged loved one and see that the child has returned, should we be sad, or should we, instead, rejoice?

And, to you, my friend, I might say, “I wonder if the wild plums are still in season? Let’s go and see, shall we?”