She, Justine, and I looked at all the things lined up on the table to be sliced, diced, minced, and otherwise chopped, in any interval we could find between when Mamie finished washing them and when she started washing them again. “Let’s go,” Colette said.

The three of us grabbed huge plastic containers. Winds gusted against us as we ran down to the road and around to the other side of the fence, then back to spread out along the trees. I started to pick them, but Colette shook her head. “Just strip them off,” she yelled. She demonstrated, grabbing a branch as high as she could, kicking her big plastic basin under it, and scraping her hands down the length of it, knocking all the plums off and into her basin as she did so. As we imitated her, mirabelles bursting with ripeness, more orange than gold, cascaded down around us into the buckets. Our only pauses were to pop fruit flecked with raindrops into our mouths.

The wind began to whip the branches back and forth, so that we had to snag them as they flew and hold them tight to keep picking. Lightning flared at the far end of the fading stubs of the wheat field. We glanced at each other and laughed, deeply enjoying our own craziness. It made an excellent break from wedding preparations and was a moment of perfect union across three generations and two continents. No tie of blood bound any of us, yet we were united in a wild sisterhood.

Damp but not yet soaked, we made it back to the house under the weight of some seventy pounds of mirabelles that we had picked in under half an hour. Titi arrived from the yard to discover us sitting in a row on the top step outside the kitchen, staring at the harvest we held with stunned pride, like pirates looking at chests of Spanish doubloons wrested from the teeth of the Spanish Armada. He grinned and took a picture. “You know what I’m going to make for your wedding, Laura? Tarte aux mirabelles.”

We made a dozen tartes that day, the dark kitchen cheered by all the people that crowded in as the rain fell outside, everyone cutting mirabelles in half and placing them on the pie crusts Titi prepared, then sprinkling them with a bit of sugar, and sliding them into the oven. I was always amazed at how simple the preparation of so much delicious French cuisine was. “Which is why the materials,” said Sébastien, still not recovered from what Americans considered tomatoes, “have to be good. Are we about done here? I’ve got to go pick up my old sound system from my cousin Jérôme; you haven’t met him and his family yet, crevette.”