Unbearable Plums

We have a plum tree in our back yard.  (Also a pear tree, but as it has never had a partridge in it, the pear tree is insignificant.)  The trees were here when we moved in 20 years ago.  We often go entire years without paying those trees any attention.  They reliably reward our neglect by producing negligible crops.  I may not have eaten 19 plums in the first 19 years the plum tree belonged to me.  

So I wasn’t paying any attention when the plum tree’s biggest branch broke, mysteriously, a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t even notice it had broken.  Melanie did, and also noticed the reason why: the branch was literally bursting with plums. 

By the time (yesterday) I got around to cutting the dangling branch completely free of the tree so no one would be killed when it finished its descent, we had probably lost half our crop to over-ripeness and the neighborhood squirrels and birds. I picked the other half – wonderful, ripe, sweet, juicy plums.  Most of them are in the picture atop this update — five large bowls full.  Others are lying on our kitchen counter, or the railing of the back deck, or in me — for the moment.

How does a nearly-barren plum tree suddenly grow more plums than its branches can bear? 

Milan Kundera in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being claims an unrepeated event is meaningless.  It’s a one-off, a chimera. Because it displays no pattern, we cannot understand what caused it.  And because it never happens again, we do not need to adjust our behavior in its light.  The tree has grown its bizarre crop, and we revel in the plums (and try to give them away before we have five bowls of glop), but the branch has broken. It cannot happen again. 

But I dissent. Unrepeated events are too exhilarating, and too ominous, to be meaningless. The universe is capable of producing an inexplicable flood of plums! Free unmerited gifts can rain down on us at any time, brightening our days, lightening our loads, maybe saving our lives! Be sure to savor the event, because you will probably not see it again!

But also — the universe is not as orderly as we like to think. It’s capricious. The branch that has never borne fruit can suddenly bear more than it can bear, and can land on your head if you aren’t watching every moment! 

The cosmologists say the universe can fall apart at any moment if the tiniest anomaly sneaks into its underlying constants. I hope a sudden shower of pears is not the result of such an anomaly — but I suppose I can relax if the event isn’t connected to anything else. You know, if the rest of the world is humming along like normal…

Which brings us to today’s standings: