Hey! Somebody Opened a Restaurant

The plums are excessively with us.  That's what comes from planting FOUR Italian plum trees in one backyard (along with numerous other fruit trees).  Maybe somebody gave them to the many back previous owners/planters.  Who knows?  In any case, each year I grieve the fact that we have too many plums and that almost everyone I know also has too many plums and that one can eat a certain number of them and make some jam and make a plum klafouti or two and even freeze a few bags, but there is no way that two people can use up all those plums.

This year, i decided to do a series of small quilted pieces all based upon one of  the plum trees.  I do one 4"x6" piece each week and, as I get enough done, sew them into rows.  By December, I'll have 49 separate pieces and a wall quilt about 3 feet by 4 feet, and also a much closer understanding and appreciation of at least that one plum tree than I have previously had.  (You can see the first 34 or so here.  The site includes the "quiltlet" and the photo that I took to work it from.)

So I find myself paying a lot of attention to the plum tree because I have to produce a different image from it each week.  In the interest of getting a feel for the quantity of plums, I put a blue tarp under it so I could actually see the plums when they ripen and fall.  If I didn't do this, I really can't see them because they fall into the somewhat long grass and, like dyed eggs at Easter, they hide themselves very well until you step on them and they go squash underfoot.

This afternoon I was looking out the kitchen window at the tree and 'what to my wondering eyes should appear' but a single raccoon, maybe one of last year's young raccoons, sitting on the blue tarp and systematically eating every single plum in sight.  I've never noticed the raccoons or the deer to pay any attention to the plums.  Similarly, they appear to be indifferent to apples.  But this raccoon had a taste for it; or maybe he just liked the idea of there being a tablecloth.  When the plums were pretty much all gone, she hustled off, perhaps to tell the rest of her family about the new restaurant that had just opened.

Raccoons!  They just never cease to interest and entertain me...