A sweet plum and memories of summer

It seems that very few butterflies remain, which makes the sighting of them even more special. There are swallowtail and fritillary butterflies out here because they enjoy the purple flowers on top of thistle plants down in the hollow. I rather like thistle plants and find them to be quite beautiful, which proves I’m nothing close to being a farmer, and clearly don’t have cows. Farmers out here battle the thistle because it can be poisonous to their livestock.

Cicadas have begun their clicking and buzzing, sounding like the rhythmic whine of an electric line out in the middle of nowhere, or the sound some of us with tinnitus experience on quiet days. Unlike crickets that make sound with their wings, cicadas use a specialized organ called a tymbal, a ribbed organ that clicks when a cicada flexes its muscles, which it does hundreds of times per second. They do this to attract mates and to disorient predators, something I may attempt.

If you listen to the sounds of cicadas, you begin to realize that there is an up-and-down rhythm to their buzzing, something I learned as a child from writer Ray Bradbury’s book, “Dandelion Wine.” I also learned that if you count the number of buzzes in the rhythm for 15 seconds, then add 39 to that number, you’ll get the outdoor temperature in Fahrenheit. It’s amazingly accurate.

This summer, for the first time in more than a quarter of a century, I tasted the fruit of a wild plum tree in the hollow when it wasn’t sour. The skin was a little acidic, but the flesh was very sweet. I handed the first one picked to a friend, thinking I’d see her face pucker up, thanks to the bitterness of the thing. Wrong. She offered a sweet grin and, from the driver’s seat of a John Deere Gator, told me it was really good. It’s a lesson I keep learning over and over again: don’t make assumptions about nature. Glad she liked it.

Soon enough, summer will be gone for another year, gone for good, sinking below the western horizon, a summer filled with memories, both happy and sad. Sometimes I wish I could put those memories in boxes and put them in the basement with all of the other stuff that’s been down there for decades, so that I wouldn’t forget, so that I can one day, in advanced old age, stumble over one of the boxes, open it, and remember, remember a full August moon in 2025, remember twin fawns moving past the front of my house on a cool August day, eating grass I had mowed the day before.

When I was doing that mowing, I also attended to the hollow, guiding my tractor and cutter around the small fields, when a passenger came on board. Or maybe she saw herself as a co-pilot. An orange and black fritillary butterfly landed on my left knee as I rumbled into a field where, in the far corner, an ancient walnut tree seemed to have pressed its own golden buzzer, showering autumn leaves that swirled to the green ground below. My butterfly friend and I stopped for a moment to watch the beautiful harbinger of the season to come, then she was gone.

The gold swirling of leaves caused me to think about my wife’s gold wedding band, one that I always wear on a chain around my neck, and I remember a day when I reluctantly asked her very softly to give it to me, which she, of course, did. It was toward the end of her journey, and she was sitting on her usual loveseat and, long past mastering her own forgetfulness, I watched as she took off the ring and began to put it in her mouth. “Hey buddy, why don’t you give me that?” I suggested. Smiling the smile of a thousand carefree summers, she said, “OK,” and happily reached out, handing it to me.

Kurth Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County and hosts the “Rural America” podcast. It can be found at https://www.ullrichruralamerica.com