Plums

To look at the house now, I suppose you’d never know

I tended the crops every day with my father

And spent my evenings repairing the holes in the barn

While my mother stayed inside stewing plums.

 

My father used to rave about the dark purple color only she could achieve.

He’d thrust his thick, rough hands deep into the bottoms of the jars

To extract the last taste. Mother would yell, “Bring the hot water!”

When he couldn’t manage to force his knuckles back out.

 

She often joked he would be buried with her latest batch,

And Diabetes proved her right in 1939.

I often stayed inside stewing with my mother,

Preserves heavy on my stomach.

 

Weeding the garden with a single pair of hands became as pointless

As shaving my chin each morning.

By five o’clock, I saw the shadows of new weeds breeding

Despite my best efforts to rid the crops of them.

 

Local church kids threw their unwanted toys in the high grass

And strategically placed stones where they would be wrenched

In the lawn mower just long enough to crush its moving parts.

I caught them one night hiding in the bushes.

 

I hurled my father’s bible in their direction, at the open window,

And it crashed, instead, into my mother’s lilac wallpaper.

The plaster crumbled behind it, revealing a hole in the exterior wall,

A sightline to the chapel’s stained-glass Jesus.

 

First, the tomatoes went, then the plums.

Mother tried to preserve what was left of them.

The deep purple turned gray, the fruit

So putrid that we couldn’t save it.