Beach plums at the from edible hedge permaculture plantings at the Greenfield Community Garden on School Street. file photo

Just when I think I’ve found them all, the angle changes and there are more. They are low hanging or shaded by leaves or above eye-level. So, back to picking. A change of perspective, in other words, and it’s a new landscape. Except, as I get older, more and more the new landscape is what summons the old.

In this case, I’m picking beach plums. There are currently three thriving beach plum bushes in our front yard that we planted five years ago. Two of the bushes are expansively green with a few berries. While the one that is closest to the front porch is loaded. Hundreds of ripe reddish-purple berries that are yearning to become jam (or sauce or syrup, depending on luck, craft or jam wizardry). It’s hard, messy, unsure work — jam making. And I’m inherently impatient with slow, methodical operations. Thankfully my dear husband and jam-making partner is both industrious and optimistic as we dutifully boil the berries, strain out pits and skin by turning a Foley’s food mill until our arms ache. Then we add the required cups of sugar and sneak in some pectin (after I insist we don’t need pectin) while we wait (and wait some more ) for it to thicken into jam. The aura of jam-making hits rock-bottom until finally we simply declare it done, (ready or not) and fill our sterilized jars with our own stunningly colorful beach plum “glop.” And whatever the final consistency, we will be spreading jam on toast or poured over ice cream and consider it our triumph of crafted devotion.

After all, it has not been a summer of great harvest for many of us. The drought had it’s way along with serious competition from other hungry locals. A friend spotted five raccoons in his mulberry tree finishing his mulberries. Another lost even her tomatoes to the deer, despite the well-known fact that deer don’t like tomatoes. A fox made regular forays to a neighbor’s well-penned chickens forcing him to dig yet deeper fences. Chipmunks, squirrels and birds did in most of our son’s pears, plums and kiwis. Yet, for some reason our beach plums survived. Even though the yew tree, home to many purple finches and song sparrows sits within easy range and offers a perfect view of the ripening plums. Still, they left the harvest to us. Perhaps, our birds have no memory of plum goodness like we do. Like I do.

And here’s where the landscape shifts. I recall a gray day on Cape Cod when I was oh so very young, eager to go out into a meadow of scrub oaks and low bush blue berries to pick the ripening beach plums. “Only the purple ones,” I was told, sour to the taste but easy to get with no thorns or predatory mosquitoes. Hours later, I (and others) returned with our full pails to the kitchen, expecting to finally head to the beach. But no beach until jam making was done. Peggy, a beloved matriarch, her gray hair coiled into a tight crown around her head, a blue denim apron over her blue denim skirt, gently but with insistence, directed the campaign. Peggy knew (without reference to the recipe books) the exact proportions needed to turn a boiling, syrupy mass into perfect beach plum jam, thick, resinous, tart and sweet. One of those truly perfect bites. And a day that entered my heart.

A few years ago, my husband and I planted our own beach plums bushes here in Greenfield. An incentive of “kitchen memories,” that patchwork ingredients, well-used implements, smells and sights, but mostly visions of several generations engaged together. Not that I learned Peggy’s “little bit of this and add a little of that.” What was instilled was more a yearning than a technique. (Besides, techniques may be Googled these days.) In truth, the older I get and the more I forget what I did five minutes ago, the more I hear the siren call of kitchen memories, recalling the kitchen’s cracked linoleum, the faces of old friends and those companions of the past. Which only means that once again, we will hope that our beach plums will become jam, or sauce, or syrup — or something very purplish in a sealed glass jar.

Ruth Charney lives in Greenfield.

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