We bought
some grapes today at the local farmers’ market.
A bowlful of green, dark blue, purple, and red grapes, kissed by the
country sunlight somewhere near Smithsburg, Maryland, has sat all afternoon on
the kitchen counter. We’ve plucked one
or two every half hour or so. They might
last until tomorrow, but hardly another day.
Sweet, succulent, just a tinge of tartness among the small red ones,
they pop when I bite down on them, a sound so soft no ear but mine could hear
it, muffled, secretive, fleeting.
 |
| All that's left of them |
Thy taste,
O grape! It flings me backward into the
past about sixty years, at just about this time of early September. Mama absolutely loved grapes, craved grapes. No grapevine had she, but friends galore,
some with grape arbors, some with vines strung along wires with posts, like a
proper vineyard. One such friend was
Hinson Sellers, whose grapevines seemed to me to fill up fields larger than our
farm. Or maybe the grapes enchanted me
just enough to think so. Mama, wrangling
an invitation from Hinson and Liza to feast on their fruit to her heart’s
content, would take me in tow. Out of
her Chevrolet we would spill, greedy to get to the grapes save for the
necessary small-talk with our hosts so as not to be unseemly in our haste.
We never
took bags, buckets, or baskets with us, as I recall, only our hands and
mouths. Hinson had several kinds. Tarheels and Concords among the reds, and
Scuppernongs among the whites. In fact,
Scuppernongs are the only whites I remember, because I favored them to the
point of not caring much about any others, red or white. Big as small plums, thick-skinned, the color
of the leaves already turning on their vines, they sweetened on my tongue as I rolled
them after biting them, combing their seeds with my teeth before spitting seeds
and swallowing grape-flesh. Mama did
what I never could—she ate the seeds along with all else.
The grapes
in our kitchen, seedless, are more convenient to snack on. I pop another, and another, as the pod grows
steadily smaller. One or two more now
and they will all be gone. But the
memory they evoke will only linger in my mind.
I will savor it like the grapes that stirred it, seeing again the
Sellers’ small farmhouse, Mama’s blue Chevy, and the sight of Scuppernongs and
Tarheels clinging on their vines waiting to delight us before the first frost.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2016
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