So, there’s this plum tree in my mom’s backyard. Every year, when I and my three brothers were little, we would start eating the plums… before they were fully ripe. Every year, my mom would warn us not to. We never listened. We just gorged on plums. The thing is… (and this is a thing you should pay attention to)… even ripe plums, if you eat too many, will… uh… how can I phrase this delicately… give you a bad case of the Hershey squirts… When they are not yet ripe, you can add horrible stomach cramps to that.

But I love that tree. It is shaped like a huge umbrella. You can go under it, inside it. It is just a magical little place… as long as you watch out for all the rotting plums on the ground.

I love the gnarled trunk and branches, the lichen growing on it. It is the kind of tree you might find in the Shire.

When I was staying at my mom’s house, I picked a lot of plums for her. I was going to make a cobbler, but I was too busy taking pictures for all of you. We did boil up some plum jam, and gave a lot of plums away.

And being under that tree in the dappled shade brought back some nice memories of when the Browne boys were small… and we took some time off from trying to maim and kill one another… in order to eat unripe plums until we were all experiencing projectile diarrhea together… which was made more interesting by the fact that there were four of us… and only two bathrooms…