Many years ago, I was in a special place in the woods where I would go to do ceremony and court the Great-Horned Owls. A man, whom I would see frequently in my wanderings near that place, was gathering a wild fruit from the bushes. I asked him what he was doing and he exclaimed, “I’m gathering wild plums for jam! It’s wild plum season!”
In the years since, I have looked for the plums in late summer, and over and over again I would miss their precious window of harvest time, traveling as I do, to other wild places during those weeks from early to middle September, when the daytime sky is impossibly blue and the night air is so sweetly crisp.
But this year is different. One of my dearest friends is getting married and I’m baking cake! And the wild plums have been waiting. I ride my bicycle up the canyon with a bouquet of dried golden roses in my arms. There is a family of plum bushes near the river that flows so quiet in it’s autumn low, golden with the glowing cotton woods, made even more golden in the slanted evening light particular to these days surrounding the autumnal equinox and the golden harvest moon waiting to break the eastern horizon. I reach the bushes and the first few are naked of their fruit but for a few black plums that have pruned on the branches.
Oh my heart!
Have I really missed them!?
But I was watching.
Oh I should have given more of my time.
I didn’t pay enough attention!
I walk to the next few bushes and there! Still red and jeweled! Oh my heart! I didn’t miss them. They are falling-off-the-branch ripe! Oh this perfect moment!
I break a day’s fast with the sweet-tart of their golden flesh and the entire chemistry of my body changes. An infusion of living Earth. I try to be slow and attentive in my picking, but from the first moment, something primal takes me over. Something deeper than my day-long hunger. It’s a ravenous grasping to satiate a hunger that’s been left unsatisfied for generations—starved beyond recognition, it seems. I pull round red rubies from the branches, in a wolfish manner. As I pluck one plum, five more fall to the ground. I go to my knees, crawling through the brambles, hair caught in branches, scratches on my arms as I fill my hands over and over and empty them into my bag.
Woodpecker does her work on the cottonwood near me, feeding from another bounty. Tears start rolling. To be a part of the grand array. Not insulated by isles of refrigerated, plastic-wrapped, florescent-lit “food”, divorced from place, blind to the Source of it all.
The scratches on my wrists feel like badges of honor. Proud as I am to pay some price for this Earth-given wealth, but knowing too that the debt is infinitely great.
People pass by on the trail and some look at me puzzled—afraid to follow their curiosity, they walk on.
Some ask, “What is it, choke cherry?”
“What do you do with it?”
“Would you like to try it, they’re tart.”
“Oh, I like tart!”
A tiny boy passes, “Look, the lady is picking berries!”
And then a little girl…”What is it?”
“They’re plums.”
“Plums?”
“Yes! Wild plums.”
“Wild plums?”
“Would you like to try one?”
Her father runs over, anxiously.
“Is it okay?”
“Um, just a couple is fine. I’ll take them. We’ll try them at home.”
I give him a copious handful.
“Oh, okay, thanks.”
His fear is understandable. He has to look them up on the internet first. We are so far gone from our knowledge of place. It is the deep unknown at this point. And Wild can be deadly. We do know that. And, I must admit, I feel a bit of the witch rattling in my throat as I speak to offer the ruby reds to the child. I get it.
I go about my work and my pace slows enough for my heart to fully break-open. I offer my tears, and song, and golden rose petals back to the plum bushes. When my bag is full, I pause a long time, and speak my praise and gratitude for what’s been placed in my humble hands. I cry for the beauty. Of gathering bounty from the land, more than I could possibly take. More than we can possibly eat. The Earth has gone overboard in Her generosity. The fruits born of eternity, the color of red-pink-orange sunlight. I pause too at the river as I ride homeward, giving the last of the rose petals to the swirl of waters.
At home I empty my bag into a giant bowl that glows with that same red-pink-orange sunlight. I rinse them clean. Polished. Marvelous. And in the morning I pour the bowl into a big pot and turn on the fire. Not a hearth, but at least there’s a flame.
I stir and the plums swell and burst under my spoon, flooding the pot with their juices. The kitchen fills with a smell that is sweet and wild, not like the plums I’ve known. I taste them over and over, letting the tang pucker my cheeks.
I work the juices and pulp through the sieve, placing the seeds and skins in a bowl to return to the land. I pour the red-pink-orange sunlight into the pot again and then I bring out the honey! A dear woman sold it to me, hand-harvested from hives in a field next to the Little Thompson River. The bees must know these plums! I stir in golden ribbons of the bee-harvested flower’s nectar. I stir and taste, stir and taste, and the tears come once again. I cry as that deep hungry place in me gets touched by the beauty of it all. And I cry for the grief of it too! Humans forgetting Earth’s natural bounty, forgetting how to recognize it, how to harvest it, how to prepare and preserve it, how to reciprocate it. And my sisters, not here to gather with me, not here to laugh and sing in the kitchen with me, not here to taste it with me as we question how much more honey to stir into the pot.
It is a thing of immense wonder to be aswirl in this whirling confluence of emotion—the unspeakable beauty touching my deep hunger and longing, while also awakening the grief of something so long lost, and so incomplete. The hunger is touched and the yearning grows infinitely bigger.
There is a profound sense of unfinished business here. A sense of the Outstretched Road; of the Long Vision. How do I walk this road well enough and far enough that I may pass the baton onto the Future Ones in a way that sees to it that this wrenching-sweet hunger, generations deep, is met on some distant fall day, generations from now, and that she feels it in her bones, and tears from deep in her heart flow down her cheeks in sweet recognition, to fall into the wild plum sauce?
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