Stepheny Checking In From My Fishing Hole On Monday

The Taste of a Summer Plum

The taste of biting into a summer plum brings me home to a time of bare feet, buzzing cornfields, and moments that seemed small then but glow bright in memory now.

I stood at the sink this morning, eating a plum, its sweet juice running down my chin. And then, like in a movie where the scene shifts, I am ten years old again, in a small kitchen in Fennville, Michigan. I am filling a brown paper bag with plums from a bowl.

This was the little house my parents bought for their hunting trips. That phase didn’t last long. They quickly discovered they didn’t like eating what they shot, but we continue to travel to the house, another chapter in our family story, set among cornfields and country roads.

With my brown bag in hand, I slipped out the back screen door. I was running away! A wide cornfield pressed up against our property, and like in the movie, Field of Dreams, I stepped into the rows and vanished.

Before long, I had eaten every plum in the bag. My runaway adventure ended right there. I turned around, walked back through the tall stalks, home. My parents never knew I’d been gone.

I don’t remember why I ran away that day, but I can still hear the buzzing, chirping, and humming of insects deep in the corn.

This morning, in 2025, as I ate a plum at my sink, that sound came back to me. I was ten again, standing barefoot in the dirt, with nothing but time, sun, and summer days that felt like they would last forever.

Sometimes the smallest things, a plum, a sound, a memory, can pull us back to who we were. And maybe, that’s what life is really about: finding those moments that let us run away for a while, until we turn and return home.

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