Every time I eat a fully ripe yellow plum, I remember being eight years old and eating them, sun-warmed, right from the tree.
They have a special taste: a hint of sour from the skin (much more if you eat them too early when they’re still clinging to their woody pits), and a tongue-crushable pulp of full-on sweetness.
I remember a lot about that tree, too: the smooth, almost metallic-looking bark that plum and cherry trees have, the odd, stumpy vestigial branches that don’t sport leaves but act like a defence system, lumpy spines without effective points but a deterrent nonetheless.
It was in the backyard of a house full of university renters three houses up on Henry Street in Halifax from where I lived. A scraggly, ignored tree, it produced anywhere from 10 to 25 plums a year, and you had to climb it and stretch your body out across the branches to reach any of them.
Timing was everything — pick them too early, and they’d be hard and sour, sometimes even chalky-bitter; wait too long and they might all be gone. (I was not the only child roaming loose in the neighbourhood.) But if your timing was right, the day was hot, and you were alone in that tree, the taste was everything a plum could be.
So why so many words about a plum?
So hard to believe that it’s fickle, random pathways, more accident than design.
I’m fascinated by memory. How it works, why it works, what it chooses to keep in both broad and particular detail.
I know some strongly anchored memories are merely repetition. Ask me what my first memory was as a child and I’ll tell you that it was the curve of the vacuum cleaner hose in the back window of the car when we were moving to Halifax and I was three. I remember what that hose looked like, but I’m no longer sure if that’s just because I think that’s what I’m supposed to remember and am now manufacturing the image that I’ve described every time someone asks the requisite earliest-memory question.
Yellow plums aren’t like that.
Taste the right kind of plum now, and 50 years melts away. I can feel the sun on my skin, and the feeling of apprehensiveness over the possibility of being caught in someone else’s fruit tree.
It’s not only plums, either.
If I walk out into just the right kind of warm, windless, hanging fog — close, comfortable and enveloping — I often get kicked back to walking on a dirt road in Center Harbour, Maine, heading for the wharf and the rowboat when I was in my early teens. It’s uncanny and unbidden, and when it happens, it is truly as though you can shift through time.
The only thing is that, as an experience, it’s unharvestable. If I bought plums simply to head for 1970s Halifax, it wouldn’t happen. Not the way it does when I meander into just the right piece of fruit.
So what is it that makes certain pathways so straightforward and effective? Why does the sound of my parents’ wall-mounted, hand-turned coffee grinder make me into a child, warm and bundled in bed, not wanting to go to school even when it’s me, now, turning the coffee grinder’s crank handle?
Why, for example, when there are so many things that I struggle to remember properly, there are also shortcuts to experiences that play out with almost cinematic accuracy?
Watered-down orange juice in a tall glass with ice can put me straight onto a cottage veranda in a wicker-seat, tall-backed rocking chair in summer, my hair really long because I’ve refused to let Mom cut it, reading William A. Nolen’s “The Making of a Surgeon” in a library hard-cover, complete with a plastic protective sleeve. I can feel my warm fingers sticky on the plastic.
Why? How?
Fixed in time for reasons I cannot fathom, bookmarked by a great indexer that certainly is not me.
So hard to believe that it’s fickle, random pathways, more accident than design. But if it were designed, what on Earth is it supposed to mean?
Yellow plums have a short season. They’ll be back next year.
And with their arrival, there’s always the chance I’ll be thrown back to 50 years ago.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
