One September several years ago I walked with a friend in Champagne. It was lunchtime, and we both would rather walk than eat, and the day was nice. We left the car at the outskirts of some small village, and found a dirt road over a hill and through the fields to the next village.

Emerging from the woods, we found two plum trees at the edge of a field. There were still a few plums on the branches, but many more on the ground. They looked inviting with their bloomy purple skins, so I picked one up and tasted it, and when I found it sweet I picked up a few more, including some very soft ones with wrinkly skins. We paused to eat one. I tasted it first.

It was one of those moments when the world falls away, and it is just this beauty, and you. “Taste this,” I said to my friend. I heard her take a juicy bite as I looked up into the leaves. “My God,” she said, “this is incredible…”

Something made me think of those plums today. About how that kind of flavor arrives from far away, and how you see the entire distance all in a flash, and you know it has journeyed to you, because it wanted to find you, this uncanny sweetness, from an overripe plum picked up from off of the ground.