Purple Plums and Sumac Red

-Autumn and Autumn 

1980, 2025

Creative Non-Fiction 

Brian Michael Barbeito 

(for Tara)

ONE

Purple Plums 1980

(Home Harken Hearth and the Stones and Water Then)

I felt messages in the yellow buttercup, as if a spirit whispered, and could sense angels. I remembered the purple plums of long ago home, the ones that blossomed in autumn, and some of the tree branches stood throughs wrought iron gates, weighty like the gates themselves, and there was a textured sky nearly always then plus multi coloured leaves red yellow orange brown just down the ravine way. So many colours in the cool-air world then, and I was an innocent, a young mystic,- alone and connected to the ether, the other world, different realms where guardians from heaven sang songs and also appeared as shapes in the drapes or tiles, even plastic toys or in the fabric of area rugs and couches. Always benevolent, assuring through their very existence, if a bit sad also for the songs they seemed to sing,- songs I couldn’t quite make out the words of but could still feel the feelings meant. 

For all that through,- nothing was provable. But what would it matter, as I had nothing to prove anyhow,- knowing the veracity and validity of it all. And I didn’t have anyone to talk to anyhow. I could say that I thought other people saw and heard the spirits and signs, knew about events and the intentions of souls good or bad,- or that I didn’t think they did. But I didn’t consider it either way. I was just to myself, in my own interesting worlds and I found them interesting. 

Until I didn’t. 

One day the world that people would later make fun of or explain away through medical models or imagination’s life, would present itself in a little too real manner for me…

I was awakened in the night to a ghost floating back and forth at the foot of my bed. It was transparent and a boy about my age, six or seven. He was trying to communicate something, but I couldn’t hear. Wave back and forth just like something from a cartoon or movie he did. But I became too frightened and began to leave. He motioned for me not to and had a panicked look on his face. The message that he had come to convey or else the help he needed, maybe both, was not complete. 

I ran across the long hallway and looked back. He flew out from the room, down the stairs, and out the front door. I never saw him again. 

Sometimes I think about him and that night and how he might have entered. The top window, the third floor one that was mine, was looking out to the ravines and their trees and wild beautiful deer and coy,

 coyotes plus feral foxes and, possibly,- the spirit world. How I loved to walk down there sometimes by the water that used to rush with confidence in the summer storms or remain calmer on say, the late summer dusks. And rain-washed stones, stones which held spirits themselves,- calling out with strange faces but with countenances that I was not frightened of for my being used to it all. 

My room was stationed above the black wrought iron gates and the purple plums. Late autumn when it’s cold is not too early to have a fire. And sometimes in the stone hearth below was crackling and flying orange embers. Maybe ghost boy was attracted by the smoke ascending to the moon-lit firmament. Maybe I’ll never know. 

TWO

Sumac Red 2025

(Autumnal Azure Agape and the Long Way Home from the Pastoral Glade)

In the meadow after the trail are flowers and bees, evergreens, and a copse of birches also. This is all at the purlieu for one can’t really go any further. But the real grand phenomenon there is the sumac, and some cultures use its deep red for colouring dye. It stands around proudly and boasts its tropical style leaves and deep redness to the calm country air. 

A soul can think many thoughts along the way there and back, under the verdant canopy as the sun filters in here and there like the sky talking to the terrene earth. But out on the glade of the meadow near where a swatch is cut through it all to walk, thoughts can ease a bit, for the peacefulness of the atmosphere there…no people or machines, no panic or psychic discord. That is surely why people seek the whimsical woodlands, the mountain, the lake, and the sea plus the desert. 

The spring lets the rains to be more than anytime it seems, and some feral shoots begin to grow through mud. Summer is a celebration for the grasses and grasshoppers and a thousand varieties of insects. Birds sing. Fall lets loose colourful leaves and ghostly winds, whist the winter shows millions of sparkles and reminds of nature’s realities and how they can be beautiful but must be respected. 

It’s a fine place to stand before heading home. There isn’t a point per se, even a subtle one like a bird watcher or photographer might want to find. It’s different. It’s not valued by the world, the secular set. It’s wordless, even for a poet or writer, and can’t be painted or photographed, sculpted, or even have a dance made about it. Perhaps it is simple touching the Source or the angelic realm, even if with some new crown chakra or fingertips or a part of one’s spirit. Yes, that might be it, a sense of home and meaning felt amidst the area and atmosphere of the glade and small series of bushes, the old copse of trees by the corner sand pit that have their root systems sticking out but are still okay. By the beginnings of autumn, the liminal, changing, still nascent and inchoate fall. 

Oh fall, or the promissory note for such, a paper writ in the sudden gust of wind like a ghost or The Holy Spirit itself, in new textured sky for a gathering of clouds, and the thousands of leaves still on the trees, kelly green and hunter green also, at the perimeter, when they sparkle in breezes and seem to appear golden. ‘We are golden now, against reason and logic, look at us watch us document us tell the others they should know…the ones that would care anyhow, as someone should see this!’ And even in the lines of small stones trying to tell a story, magic can be discerned, as looking down can also be a way of searching within through and via the outer. 

—-

Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian poet, writer, and photographer. His third compilation of prose poems and pictures, The Book of Love and Mourning, is forthcoming in autumn 2025.