I woke up this morning thinking about beach plums. For the previous week or so the few bushes that grow along the edge of the dirt road that runs in front of our house have been ripening their stunted fruit one by one. Shaded by overhanging oaks and coated by the dust of passing traffic, they do not receive enough sun or sand (or, perhaps, salt) to bring forth a significant crop. At most, on my way out to get the mail, I pick one or two to test their ripeness and whet my appetite for a harvest elsewhere. They serve as a kind of roadside clock, a reminder that beach plums are here again, rather than the thing itself.
But it was not these berries that made me think of beach plums this morning; it was the morning itself, a whole conflux of elements coming in my bedroom window: the high, steady, strident call of a day cricket, the deep, distant blue sky above the brown-edged oak leaves, a cool cleanness in my nostrils as the air flowed in like water, the unexpected comfort and warmth of a blanket pulled up over my limbs, a sudden quiet and sense of ripe yellowness in the year – all through a three-foot-square window.
Yet all this did not say ‘beach plum’ in my mind so much as it triggered another set of sense memories of past pickings: of the firm, particolored fruit hanging, glowing among the dark leaves; the feel of plucking and the sound of plopping them one by one into yellow-plastic peanut butter buckets; the satisfying sight and rumble of pouring them out into the sink, like a mound of pastel glass marbles, for washing; and later, the pervasive, rich smell of cooling jelly.
Then, and only then, through the inarticulate matrix of early morning signs and the wordless rush of memories they generated, did I know, fully and awake for the first time, that the many-colored ring of beach plums had come round again, and that I must make time once more to search them out.
I suppose it was my semiconsciousness, my half-wakefulness at dawn that allowed me to be so susceptible and receptive to such an indirect but forceful process of recognizing a particular time of the year, so much more compelling than if I had merely ‘remembered’ it was beach plum time. But I do not think it would have happened even a few years ago, though I have been trying to live by outdoor rather than indoor clocks and calendars for some time.
I think I may, however, be attaining at last, in some small degree, a certain extension of my senses by having lived here through dozens of seasons. I do not necessarily mean by that any actual greater capacity for seeing colors or hearing sounds or smelling odors – the kind of dramatically increased perception that people forced to live for extended periods in the wilderness reportedly undergo. I am still too ‘enclosed’ by the comforts of civilization for that kind of forced extension.
Still less do I mean anything mystical, that sudden ‘extension of self’ with all surrounding natural processes that one can sometimes get floating weightlessly down a tidal creek or when suddenly overwhelmed by the rushing buoyancy of a spring day.
What I mean is something more common and constant that does not go beyond the love of things themselves, but which in the long run is more sustaining than either a practical survival knowledge or epiphanic communions with nature. It comes from a simple, growing familiarity with the elements and processes of one’s natural neighborhood, so that through a conscious informed following of and attentiveness to nature, her individual signs – a bird’s first song in spring, the change of the sea’s color – cease to be merely detached things, pleasing perhaps but decorative merely, and are transformed into real signs, phonemes of a larger language which, if we cannot yet understand it fully, still catches our ear with a sense of rhythm and syntax.
More and more, as the seasons come round again, I find I am held by a myriad of small, gentle ties – the brightening of killifish in the marsh ditches, the arrival of the snow buntings, the first blood-red tupelo leaves outside my study window – that tug at me with a growing associative power that is nothing mystical, nothing beyond the love of the things themselves, but which begin to move me in the deeper rhythms of which they are a part. I begin at last to know, from practice, attachment, repetition and use, what Henry Beston meant in his shack on the Outer Beach, when he invoked ‘the tremendous ritual of the year.’