Plum wild

I went wild plum picking the other day.

That’s not to be confused with going plumb crazy, which I also do from time to time. No, what I did was find a dirt road, pull my car over to the side, and start picking wild plums.

They are just about to get ripe, but not quite, and the time frame to pick them is pretty small – Memorial Day to D-Day is basically the window, in this part of the world. They always seem to grow on the side of the road, and along fences. I don’t know why that is.

Many times I’ve been driving down the road and seen a bunch of wild plum trees hanging full with little red and yellow and green orbs of paradise, and it hurts my heart to know they are just going to fall off and rot. I have dreams in which I am surrounded by wild plum trees and they are bursting with fruit, so much I can’t pick it all. This must be how Adam and Eve felt. If they’d only stuck to eating plums, a lot of trouble could have been avoided.

Wild plums are much smaller than their tame counterparts, and generally not as sweet. I love them when they’re green, just before they start to ripen, so tart that they turn my lips inside out, not to mention my digestive system. I put a little salt on them, and I could eat 100 at a time.

I never take a sack to put the plums in. I usually just line my pockets or, as I did the other day, take off my baseball cap and fill it up.

You have to be careful picking wild plums. Some people might even consider it stealing, but I hope there aren’t many such Nazis around. The main issue is avoiding briers, because wild plum trees are usually surrounded by blackberry bushes (that’s another subject, but we’re about a month early for that). The other thing to be careful of is, as my mom used to say, you might “come up on a snake.”

But those usually hang out in apple trees.