this is just to say

I have eaten the plums

that were in

the cardboard box

 

 

Well, I have eaten them.  The box is empty.

 

They were delicious/ so sweet.

But the eating of the plums has revealed in me not an urge for culinary larceny but an inexactitude.  I am oh so unlike William Carlos Williams (with his crafty, quiet, intentionally-snarky plum eating).  For starters, this was a ten pound box.  Ten pounds of purple-y, sugary, fiber-y, plumness.  So I shared.  Secondly, the plums now serve as a textbook example of what, for the sake of clarity, I’ve termed “my not-that-neat-ness.”  

This past weekend was what I like to call Thanksgiving v.1.0.  Or, Thanksgiving minus the pilgrims.  Canadian Thanksgiving is refreshingly free of archaic and falsely optimistic myths of camaraderie amongst the natives and the colonial imperialists.  You just sit down to dinner with a bunch of great friends and eat turkey.  And you get a day off of work!

So with our long weekend, Justin and I went east, to what British Columbians call “the interior,” or, more specifically, the Okanagan.  I like to think of it as a kind of Canadian Tuscany.  Imagine the rolling hills and vineyards without the pre-Christian ruins:

As far as British Columbia is concerned, the Okanagan Valley is truly the hallowed home of the pitted fruit.  And after a weekend of climbing, camping and admiring the flickering yellow aspens, we stopped by the Mariposa produce market for what would be our contribution to that evening’s holiday dinner.  

(oh the seasonal bounty!)

Hence, the plum.  But not just any plum, the delicious, nutritious, tiny, sweet and (yes, Mr. Williams) almost sinful Italian prune plum.  

When we arrived (albeit late after hours in traffic) for T-Giving v1.0 to discover there were already three desserts available for community consumption, we decided to toss our bounty into the heap.  Resulting in the first plum product: the crisp.

Oh the gustatory delight that is the prune plum crisp!

 

In a four-hundred degree oven their dusky indigo skins wrinkle and shrivel.  They redden and they shine, hiking up their skirts to reveal a golden fleshy center.  My that sounds provocative– but they are so sweet, so rich!  After gorging ourselves on potatoes fixed three ways, sampling the four desserts (pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin pie, plum crisp, and chocolate brownie with nectarines), and pushing paper lunch bags heavy with plums into the hands of most of my friends, I left with a full belly and a half-full box of plums.  What to do?

Though we returned home to a mostly empty kitchen, we did have oats and we did have plums.  Which is how I got the idea of making oatmeal with baked plum topping for my lunch.  I got up Tuesday morning, shoved a bowl of plums in the toaster oven, waited ’til the whole apartment smelled like jam, and packed the gooey, juicy, mauve-y treat in an old yogurt container and headed to work.

It was on the bus, when I went digging for some chapstick, that I first realized the tupperware might not be as water-tight (or in our case plum juice-tight) as I’d perhaps naively hoped.  So you see, after that circumlocutious meditation on the plum, we’re back where we began: my inexactitude.  It was when I arrived at the library on a special trip to return Justin’s overdue copy of Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate, that I discovered that a full blown plum bomb had quietly exploded in my backpack.  All of it–without exception–had been plummed.

Behold, poor Mrs. Dalloway:

I believe the e-mail from the librarian said something along the lines of, “A book checked out under your name was returned today covered in a sticky, purple liquid.”  Needless to say, I am now the proud new owner of Mr. Pinker’s thoughtful exploration of the capabilities of the nascent brain.