The stems of the amaranth in my yard have turned a deep embarrassed purple in just the last week. They were just part of the background of an unusually lush tangle of knee-high greens, but the shortening hours of sunlight and almost freezing temps have triggered a chemical color shout-out that makes them tremble and vibrate. It hasn’t been cold enough to kill yet but “one more magenta shirt will do you.” It’s a busy time for nature—shutting down one whole system and shifting gears into autumn’s flare of color and then winter’s long rest.
Similar switches have been madly clicking in my bloodstream. And I do mean madly. Since my childhood I’ve been aware of a seasonal dread that creeps in with the failing light. I discovered it when I was 6 and started school. Ask not whose name the winter wind calls. It calls for you, Grasshopper, it calls for you.
I assure you I fiddled away the summers—building forts, fighting wasps, catching tadpoles and making ink out of pokeberry juice. Previously long green summers just rolled on and on. But suddenly school waited.
Mama took advantage of the waning summer days to can the last of the tomatoes, squash, beans and corn to feed her big family through another Texas winter. I had limited enthusiasm for these mundane foods. There was a distinct scarcity of sweetness in our diet. Blackberries were rare as hen’s teeth. Mama made preserves of the little yellow pear tomatoes she grew in her flowerbed. When I was just a toddler I was found under the kitchen table with a spoon and a pint of her tomato preserves.
But we had wild hog plums. Born on scraggly bushes that grew in thickets at the edge of abandoned fields, they were small and knotty and tart as a vinegar kiss. They didn’t taste like the pictures of plums in my health book. I learned early of their powerful pucker power. That was until the first freeze would blush and soften the fruit with deeper color and sweeten its flesh. The leaves would echo the color change of the ripe fruit. They displayed a sunset shade of tangerine pink the same as the underside of a scissor-tail flycatcher’s tail feathers. When the leaves changed I knew the fruit had finally found its native sweetness.
I can close my eyes right now and picture an old gallon galvanized bucket filled with hog plums. The bucket is beat all to hell and the fatigued spots bleed rusty red against the blue gray zinc and the endless shades of the fragrant plums and the sun-drenched light seem the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. And that realization is sharper than the broken edge of a beer bottle.
The perception of beauty as pain has always been one of the aha markers of depression for me. The slanting ray of autumn light increases the sadness of the world exponentially. The gramma grass and ponderosa trunk that conspire to occupy the entire span of my breath and exit my body as tears.
Mama would wash the plums and boil them with pectin and sugar. A scum would form at the edge of the blue granite pan that reminded me of the fretted whites of eggs fried in bacon grease. She would pour the jelly into half pint jars and seal them with metal lids and rings or pour melted wax in the top of the jar. Every batch was a different shade of amethyst. Set in the kitchen window they became prisms of pure light. The color of bruises, of tornado clouds. They held promises for January mornings. A biscuit brown as a desert mesa—broken open and releasing tendrils of stored solar heat radiating into the atmosphere.
Crowned with a big dollop of golden yellow fresh churned butter (tiny flecks of buttermilk still dotting the crevices of the butter) and then nesting a generous spoon of wild plum jelly like a garnet on the Pope’s ring. Bless us all for we have sinned.
