The forbidden fruit of unbidden recollection

Opinion

This is an admission of a crime. A small crime, but a crime nonetheless.

I ate a yellow plum Tuesday night, a simple yellow plum from some distant Ontario orchard tree, and I was transported in time. They’re a familiar taste, the outside skin taut and sharply sour, the flesh bright and sweet, the last bit around the hard-ridged pit sour again, as if no matter how ripe the plums are, beauty often fails to extend to the core of things.

They’re a brief summer treat, the first of the plums to show up in stores, but their half-life is short; the fruit flies arrive in small whirling loops, and yellow-plum season ends almost as soon as it began.

But this one plum, this Tuesday night plum, was different. For no reason, it suddenly carried me back decades to the neighbourhood where I grew up in Halifax, to the me as a six- or seven-year-old, when six- or seven-year-olds could roam the neighbourhood as long as we didn’t cross any streets. Prisoners of a single city block, but explorers of all the distant lands within, yards, front and back, up over fences and into gardens, under porches where the lattice had a hole big enough to enter. Home in summer when the streetlights came on. You get the idea.

And three houses up Henry Street, past the Mikas house and the Cook family’s, was a light-blue duplex with parking for two cars in the back on a rough dirt-and-grit parking area, a space that in all the other houses on the block would have been a grassy backyard. And on the edge of the rough dirt parking spots was a tree.

I had gone behind that house regularly to pull fresh green beans through from the other side of the fence where they were growing in the Cooks’ backyard (so Mr. Cook wouldn’t catch me) and eat them at their best, just plucked, but also to check on the progress of the tree.

The tree was a scraggly, misbegotten yellow plum tree, covered with the short spikes of failed branchlets that might serve as defence from climbers, but not much of a defence from stubborn six-year-olds. I had been watching the tree — or more precisely, the plums on the tree — for weeks. For the long weeks of a child, watching eight or nine plums slowly, slowly grow and start to change colour, through hard green to greenish-yellow, waiting for the point when they were ready to eat.

I was not patient. But I was patient enough to wait until they were close to fully ripe.

After a few green beans I was ready for dessert and climbed the tree to eat one of the neighbour’s plums. Just one. But one led to two, two to three, and finally to nine. Did I mention it was a small tree, and that the entire crop of plums was, well, nine plums? Because, perched in that small tree, I ate the neighbour’s entire crop.

Did they care? Did they notice? Were they even paying attention to a haunted, wizened and stunted plum tree with few leaves and even fewer plums scrabbling up next to their cars? Were they waiting for just the right day to harvest their crop?

I don’t know. Truth is, unlike most of the other houses in the neighbourhood, I didn’t even know who lived there. The next house, dark-grey, was the Lawrences, the one after it, red with white trim, was the impossibly-old Mrs. Bird (who was, in truth, probably no older than I am now); Mrs. Bird who used to hand out a single candy from her front porch and ask “So, what are your parents doing?”

The fact the people in the light-blue house were strangers made stealing the plums easier. I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me, which made the solution to getting caught simple — run as fast as my legs could carry me and then stay out of sight for a few weeks, safe in the knowledge they wouldn’t march straight down to my house and report me to my mother.

But I also know those plums weighed heavy on six-year-old me. Truth is, even then, I could imagine how I’d feel if someone had stolen my plums.

Oddly, they weigh heavy on me still, thinking about it. And the key that unlocked that door in my memory was not the stiffness of the peel or the bright jewel of the yellow pulp inside, but the tiny, thin sour layer of flesh right next to the stone.

And miles from Halifax, in the dark night of the 11 p.m. kitchen of dear friends, I was sent back years, suddenly flooded with memories of not just plums but my family’s own long-ago kitchen, of our backyard filled with the buried remains of lost pets, of two hamsters and two turtles and a legion of gerbils and I think a cat, and I wondered.

I wondered, as I often have, about what the natural purpose is for keeping all that information in our heads, and also why it sometimes breaks loose in a flood from something as simple as a taste or a smell or the first few bars of a song you haven’t heard in years.

I have a small tinge of regret that I can’t call up that memory world at will. It’s not the same as when it all arrives unbidden. So I wait, and when it comes I lean into it, roll around in it, enjoy it to the fullest, regrets and all.

By the way, for all my guilt, I am far from reformed.

Knowing everything I know now, six-year-old me would eat those plums again. And, if caught, I wouldn’t stand and take my punishment.

I’d run.

Run like the wind, until I was gasping for breath, barely able to stand, and thrilled with my small and stolen victory.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca