A couple of weeks ago, before winter drove up unannounced with all his alcoholic sisters and insufferably petulant children and refused to do anything other than move in, I was outside tidying up the garden, when I got a glimpse at my naked, vulnerable plum trees.
But let’s back up. In the springtime, I was at the bar yapping away at how the one thing missing from my gardens was fruit, when the barman mentioned that his yard was overrun with plum trees, and he’d be happy to dig up a few seedlings for me. I was a few whiskeys into the evening at this point, so apparently thought this was a great idea, and the next day, a five-gallon bucket of freshly dug small plum trees turned up.
A Cooter Hollow Life Lesson: When your bartender goes to work with a shovel on your behalf, you don’t fuck it up.
I didn’t have any idea how to plant a tree seedling, or where plum should go for adequate sun, water, drainage, ad blorghium, but books and the internet did, so that much I figured out. Plums (I’m guessing most trees) play a cruel trick when transplanted, where they look sad and droopy and lose leaves and do all but convince you that they’ll never survive, until you stop obsessively monitoring them. And, as soon as you forget about them for a couple days, they start to thrive. This is known to nine-year-olds throughout the world as a “psych out.” It’s better known to me as “asshole.”
So the plum trees did well all summer, and then the cold hit, they started to lose their leaves and look chilly and I was reminded to expect several months of snowfall. Remembering the Cooter Hollow Life Lesson already shared with you, I realized it was time to cover them. This required things like mechanical ingenuity and lumber, so I asked S for help.
You know what I was expecting? I was expecting a couple of pieces of OSB (the plywood stuff made of visible wood shavings) and teepee them over a tree. But that’s because I’m the sort of person who uses the same pocket knife to slice cheese and hack through a dead vine. S had another idea, apparently because he didn’t want to spend the winter listening to me bitch about the fact that my teepees were being blown over every time the wind picked up. We brought home a pile of lumber, got out the chop saw and the table saw and a couple of impact drivers and various other power tools from which I tend to shy away, because I like my appendages attached to my body. But he set it all up, made one a cover to use as a sample, then reminded me that it’s my project.
Nice, right?
Within five minutes, I’d broken two drill bits, in addition to smashing a thumb and reinforcingly bashing an already threatened knee. But I think that’s the worst of it– and for someone as ambisinistrous with tools as I am, the fact that I broke neither bones nor the more expensive parts of the power tools almost makes me want to believe in some sort of higher power. Then I remember that I live in a place where it snows half the year, which, if there wasn’t already overwhelming evidence against such fanciful thinking, would do it. There may be no god, by there shall be plums.