| Just came in from wandering through the gardens, checking out the latest flower blooms, admiring the vegetable garden, and perusing the grape vines for signs of progress. There are dozens of clusters of tiny concord grapes all over the vines. I have the vines anchored to the wall of my studio, more for ornament than anything else, but if things go right this summer, the vines will be loaded with grapes. This vine grew from a cutting from my mother's Concord vines. I don't know if I've written about it before on DAR, but it is very impressive. In fact, it is so impressive that it used to attract a small band of admirers...a group of Italian men who were in their 70s and 80s, who would walk down the street and gather around the vine, which grows up a fence and then covers a large tree in my mother's yard. By autumn, the grapes hang in masses from the vines and up into the tree so that it looks more like a grape tree than a vine. In fact, the men called it "The Tree" when they talked to my mother about it. Each day, the men would come down the street on their circuit of the neighbourhood, then stop for a break at my Mom's house. In addition to canes, most of them carried those little "walking stick chairs" that you poke into the ground and unfold when you want to have a rest. The men would stake their places on my mom's lawn beneath "The Tree", then sit around and talk in the shade of the grape vines with great clusters of grapes over their heads. Most of them couldn't speak any English, so they would talk among themselves, occasionally pointing up at the vines while nodding their heads. One afternoon, one of them even came down the road carrying a set of pruning shears in his pocket and asked my mother if he could prune away the leaves to open them a bit to let the sun shine on the grapes to ripen them better. Most of the men are gone now, but "The Tree" still remains, and now its offspring grows here at the farm.. hopefully it will attain or perhaps surpass the production of the parent. Today, I'm just looking at the leaves, wondering how long it will be before they are large enough to snip a couple of dozen away to make dolmas. (o: |
