Plum Jelly

Myrtle Dye

When I was about 5 years old, my family moved from our Spanish style home in Nashville to a California style condo in a suburb of Nashville. I had no idea at the time that we were moving as a result of my father’s first bankruptcy, something to do with a coal mining investment, and I didn’t really care, because this condo was sweet AF. 

The first of their kind in Nashville, the Coronado condos had everything your 70s swinger heart -- or 5 year old child -- could desire: sunken living rooms, vaulted ceilings with lofts in every bedroom, mirrored closet doors, and off white everything. 

It was this off white color scheme that would come back to haunt my parents after they left me for a week with my father’s mother, my Grandma Wall. Grandma, or Myrtle Dye or Miss Dye to those who were not me, was at that time a 75 year old widow and mother of three. 

Born in 1903, she lived through two World Wars, the Great Depression, the invention of television, a moon landing, Watergate, Reagan (or “that motherfucking cocksucker,” as she called him), as well as the sudden death of her husband, the loss of a grandchild to crib death, and a surprise retirement party when she was 70. Needless to say, my Grandma had very few fucks to give. 

She was, despite all that she had lived through, a very snuggly grandma, unlike my maternal grandmother, Modine. She spoiled me greatly and I loved her to death. Time with her was never boring, but it was sometimes anxiety inducing. 

This was the case during her stay that week in the condo. Out one day for a walk, she noticed that the plum trees that lined the center median of the main drive of the complex, and which were surely meant to be decorative, had ripe plums falling off them. Never one to let anything ever go to waste, she promptly set about picking all of those plums. 

As a tightly wound child, I was sure this was not legal and something that we would surely get in trouble for and would affect my future ability for education and employment. My grandmother was not concerned. When someone stopped to ask us what we were doing, she told them, “Picking plums,” in a tone that made them roll up the window and keep driving. 

This is a woman, who, when her middle son came home from the Air Force in his early 20s and had to have an emergency appendectomy, ordered the surgeon, her boss, to skin graft the tattoo she saw on her son’s arm on the operating table. The surgeon, stunned, looked at her and said, “Miss Dye, you know I can’t do that,” to which my grandmother replied, “I’m the head nurse of the surgical floor and no son of mine will have a goddamn tattoo and you will do it.” He did it. My father said he woke up from his appendectomy wondering why his arm hurt so much.  

To understand this force of nature, it’s necessary to go back to the start. 

Myrtle Dye Wall was born in a small town 1903 in West Virginia to a farming family. She went to a one room schoolhouse and later to a one room nursing school before making her way -- somehow -- to Nashville, Tennessee to the Peabody School of Health in the late twenties. She soon become the Rural Health nurse for Rutherford County and was able to buy her own car, a Model T, that she would drive as far as paved roads would allow, before proceeding to farmhouses on horses the farmer’s would leave hitched at the bottom of the roads  to tend to the sick, deliver babies, and help people cross to the other side. 

I try to imagine the guts and tenacity it took to travel across state lines as a single woman in the early 20th century, especially considering she most likely had little or no money. In pictures, she sits next to her Model T or in a rather revealing one piece swimsuit, always with the same impish grin. Tomfoolery was certainly afoot. 

While in Rutherford County, she made friends with Mary Murfree, a debutante and descendant of the Murfrees that lent their name to the county seat, Murfreesboro. I don’t know how this friendship developed, but I love to think of this society lady and my West Virginia grandma smoking cigarettes and raising hell together. 

Mary Murfree became engaged to another member of Murfreesboro society, Herschel Wall, and well, as my grandmother’s eventual married name implies, once Herschel and Myrtle laid eyes on each other it was all over for Mary Murfree. Luckily, Mary didn’t mind and wished the couple well in their new found love. Unluckily, my grandfather’s wealthy family did mind him marrying what they perceived as West Virginia trash and promptly disowned him.

Disowned and in love, they had three boys: my Uncle Pat, my father, and my Uncle Pooch, the baby. My grandfather farmed and my grandmother nursed, by this time at the new Rutherford County Hospital. 

My father told me his father collapsed in the field one day and was taken to the hospital and he never saw him again. My father was five and children didn’t go to hospitals in those days. I have since seen my grandfather’s death certificate and obituary and although the primary cause of death was pneumonia, it was the acute leukemia that got him in the field that day. I’m about four years older than he was then, so I wonder if I’m out of the danger zone. Who knows. 

Life changed for those little boys after that day. My grandmother certainly still loved them, but she failed to understand that she still had a family without her husband. When asked to work holidays or weekends, she would say she was available because she “didn’t have a family.” She sometimes said this in front of her children, who would spend a lot of time at the hospital. 

So this is the woman who someone dared to ask about the plums she was picking that sunny day in Middle Tennessee. A woman who had seen some shit. 

After hours of picking plums -- the trees went all the way up a long hill, and we were carrying loads and loads back to the condo -- my grandmother set about making plum jelly. This part did not bother me in the least. My grandmother was good at making all kinds of interesting things, like dandelion wine or buckeyes or fried Bologna. She had taught me how to shell beans and dig walnuts out of their black dirt encrusted pods.  I loved doing these things with her and this task was no different. I was also, and remain, largely ignorant of the messes I tend to make. I guess it runs in the family. 

By the time my parents got back from their trip, we had made enough plum jelly to last us until I was well into high school. We had also, according to my mother, turned the entire condo purple. I have no memory of the purple condo, but I know two things to be true: my grandmother didn’t give a fuck about cleaning and my mother could tell if someone walked in and out of a room, she was so clinically clean. The truth, therefore, lies somewhere around a partially lilac condo. 

Shortly before my grandmother died, a few years after we ate the last jar of that jelly, I asked her why she had never dated or remarried after my grandfather died when she was still in her early forties. She didn’t hesitate before she answered, “Because I only loved one man, and the son of a bitch went and died on me.” 

After he died she never even kissed another man. That’s love, but it’s also anger. And a lot of grief. So much grief. Enough to fuel a lot of jelly making, that’s for sure. I love my husband with all my whole heart, and if he died right now, I might never date again. Maybe I have more Myrtle Dye in me than I want to admit. I get having the best and not wanting to mess with the rest. When you find and lose your soulmate, I could see romantic love losing it’s, well, romance. I, too, might be tempted to take up crocheting, quilting, jelly making, traveling, antiquing. Anything else except looking for a love inferior to the one you had known. 

My grandmother and grandfather had so little time together, I often wonder what it was like, with both of them working, raising those three boys. I like to imagine they were happy, so happy, that they breathed their love in like a warm spring day every day and never took it for granted. That they sometimes looked at each other and thought, “How did I get this lucky?”  But I imagine they didn’t always. We don’t. We get too caught up in the little things and miss the big picture and before we know it, the people we love the most are gone. The sons of bitches always go and die on us.