Nettie presented me with a small bouquet of wild plum blossoms today - I had spotted a handful blooming on my way to pick her up at my mom’s - there are fewer and fewer of them to be seen around here, though they used to fill the ditches and waterways in my childhood, their frothy, creamy-white flowers filling the air with fragrance around Easter-time. This small bouquet perfumed the car as we drove home and worked their magic in the kitchen as well, and half-way through afternoon chores I realized I was still smelling them and I thought somehow I was carrying the perfume in my hair or clothing, but realized after a few moments musing about it, that I was smelling the plums blooming in the copse south of the house, their fragrance carried on the wind.
We planted 75 small whips of Prunus americana (wild plum or American plum) nine years ago when we were just settling into this acreage. It was one of the first things we did and it seemed significant, meaningful, if a little hopeless, as we dug through the tough sod and planted what looked like little more than twigs which were almost impossible to spot (save for the small piles of wood mulch) in the sea of brome grass when we were done. I walked along that double row of plums today to see how they were doing. I suppose maybe 20 or 30 have survived, most of them being choked out by grass or succumbing to drought or eaten by rabbits or deer in the first few seasons. Those that remain are still small and insignificant looking, only one or two look as though they might have a few flowers this year. But this will be the first time any of them blooms, and I suppose that if two or three can really become established, mature trees that begin to send out suckers, there might eventually be a thicket here, the way I imagined it, even if I don’t see it in my lifetime.
Leonard in the plum thicket south of the house
There are plums all along the waterway in the field south of our house. It isn’t a copse, really, though I used that word earlier - it’s just a low spot in the field that’s been left to nature, which seems more and more like a rarity - most waterways have been cleared of trees and shrubs in recent years, if they’ve been left at all, but this one is an exception and every spring I’m drawn out to visit the plums while they’re blooming, standing for a few moments in their profusion of petals and sweetness, perhaps the biggest show of romance I can think of that happens naturally here on the prairie, where most things are subtle and nuanced - the plums are exuberant extravagance, bursting forth for just a few days with their blossoms, which are quickly blown away by spring winds, leaving the plums rather like Cinderella after the ball - looking and probably feeling a little plain in their regular clothes.
The morning after we brought Nettie home, I remember waking up on the sofa in the library, which sat in front of an east-facing window, the bassinet next to me lit up by the rising sun, and the smell of wild plums filling the air. It seemed other-worldly, I felt hardly in my body. I think some of that was hormones and breastfeeding and really I have so few clear memories from Nettie’s first year, but that is one of them. The smell of wild plums and the bassinet and daffodils and the tips of her black hair glowing in the golden sun of an early April morning and her tiny curled body in her rosebud sleeper, everything soft and quiet and sweet.
Last night as I walked back to the house after shutting the animals in, I heard the back door slam. It was dark already and I squinted to see if the wind had caught it or if a cat or dog had pushed it open, and then saw a little figure walking towards me in her winter coat and scarf, though the night was mild. “Hey Mom, I came to take a nighttime stroll with you,” she said, slipping her gloved hand into mine as we met on the path, and though this would be our first ‘nighttime stroll’ together I smiled and only laughed inside and replied like we often did this, “this is a good night for a stroll,” and squeezed her hand and we walked towards the black shadows of the hedgerow and she asked “What’s that smell?” and I said “that’s the wild plums blooming.” We stood still at the edge of the trees, the wind blowing our hair back from our faces, the smell of the plums filling our noses, and she said “There must be thousands and thousands of them,” and I said “Tomorrow we’ll go and see them before they’re gone.”
