The only word for this year’s plum moon season is, abundant.  It began in the late of winter.  The weather warmed and the fruit trees, all of them, bloomed at once.  Normally, the apricots will bloom first.  Followed by plumbs and then by the cherries.  Last would come the peach blossoms.  This year, within three days, they all bloomed.  There is little like having multiple blooms of color so early and at once.  And the bees seemed to know it.  For it seemed as if every bee in the county showed up that week.  A low level, constant, buzzing went on for days.  We loved it and we worried about it.

Regardless of what the weather, the trees, and the bees were saying, it was late winter and we still had a good month and a half to have a hard freeze.  At the end of the week, the Sunday dinner consensus was the trees—flower or fruit—would get a freeze and this would become a very low fruit year.

We were wrong though.  No freeze ever came.  Instead of looking at bare trees, we thinned fruit again and again until harvest came.  Yet we never came close to removing enough fruit to keep limbs from breaking, even though we placed stickers for limb support as well.

The cherry trees were so full that by the time we’d picked—and had our neighbors pick—and canned cherries we were already canning tired.  The apricots though, left no time to catch a breath.  As we picked apricots, we couldn’t help a sideways glance at a plum tree that seemed in competition with the cherry trees.  How in the world would we get everything canned and take care of the hay fields and cows?  The plum moon season arrived and there was no doubt there were three years’ worth of plums to harvest.  We were less than a quarter way through plum harvest when the peaches ripened.

Each landscape has its own theology.  From water to dirt, every land speaks its own particular truth.  We certainly had our thought about what the landscape would gift when winter weather turned to a warm blooming week.  Yet, the mystery of the Yakama Creek landscape held something else in mind.  Maybe we will fully realize that something else in the mid-of-winter when the plum jam comes out of the cupboard.