Plum Trees

When I was very young the house I lived in was located in an odd little corner of far North Minneapolis. There were about 20 houses on our block, with undeveloped land to the South and West. Most of the houses had been built in the 1920s, so they would have been about 30 years old at the time. My best friend Kevin lived two doors down, that's his house in the above picture. Right behind the house was a plum tree, it had probably been planted when the house was new. In the late summer the plums would ripen and we would eat ourselves sick on them.

Years later, I lived about 40 blocks south of there, on North Fifth Street. That house had a plum tree in the back as well although, being in an industrial area, it was lonely and needed another tree to cross pollinate with it to bear fruit. Despite this, it did blossom, usually in Mid-May. One year, however, it was blossoming on April 21st. I remember the date because that’s the day I got married and the bride’s bouquet was made from those blossoms.

Years after that, when we had a family, we moved about fifteen miles north of Minneapolis. After we had settled in, I took the boys exploring down by the Rum River. There, on its bank, was a forlorn plum tree, broken down and barely alive. But full of plums.

Like the plums of my childhood, these were old-growth American Plums, not the European or Japanese cultivars. They were smaller, with a tough skin, but the flesh is tart and delicious. If I lived on some acreage, I would consider planting ‘wild’ plum trees, if only to relive that simple joy from my youth and the memory of my children discovering them as well.