GRAPES

I remember (this is the 1940s) when I was a wee tot and mom would give me a snack of grapes.

They were often sweet, sometimes sour, always had seeds and a skin that was yucky, but I loved them.

They were handy to have in your pocket or somehow concealed on your trike for a later knosh.

And, you were popular with other kids, if you had some grapes.

Grapes didn't grow all that well in the Midwest. It was just too danged cold in the winter. An exception was western Iowa, where I worked most of my adult years, had a grape industry at one time. Betty Anne Wine, I believe it was called. It was a rival to pop for being sweet.

The vines were mostly wiped out when corn farmers started spraying herbicides and pesticides during the 1950s.

But, I have to revise that myth. We've just returned from a week in the Iowa-Nebraska "coastline" —ok. It's along the muddy Missouri River, but at least it's wooded and green on the shore—and learned from our resident friends there that farmers are turning away from corn and getting into the gentrified crops...like grapes! Nebraksa now boasts about a dozen small wineries that somehow manage to keep their plantings alive over the harsh winters. I wish them well. Heck, if they can grow great wine grapes in outback Australia, they ought to have a leg up in temperate Nebraska.

Force space skip 60 years. . . (It's a literary term. Look it up)

I now find myself and Cherry, the dog (see picture below), walking through Oregon's bounty — maybe I should say "forgotten" bounty.

At the top of the hill is an old property awaiting development, we hear. But the house and outbuildings still cling to the kneehigh weeds. The previous owner hauled all the trash out of the garage/storage building and has left it there to rot until the next owner does something.

Since I collect trash as I walk the dog, the old place is our regular stop. Cherry, of course, finds millions of interesting scents to follow. No one's around to object if she takes a whiz on the weeds either.

Grapes...back to the story.

On one of our sojourns, I spied a pile of leaves near the old house's back door. I had walked by this pile all summer without really noticing it . . . just like the other weeds and plants gone wild.

It had rained overnight, so plants were wet and sparkling in the morning sun. Something INSIDE the pile of leaves was also sparkling.

I lifted a leaf or two and was met with a solid mass of light green grapes. Each cluster was as big as my hand or bigger. I sampled one. ZING! It was delicious. . . but it reminded me of the grapes my mom had given me as a tot—tough skin, seed in place, slightly tart.

I gave my daughter-in-law a small sample and she cooked them down to juice and proclaimed them marvelous! I filled up a fair sized cooler with them and passed them on to her as well. She's now calling for more!

(Since the original post, the contractor and his men arrived with dumpsters, chainsaws and a bulldozer. The buildings are gone. The grapes are gone. Only a few ornamental trees and shrubs [these pruned to military precision] remain. But, a week or so before, I couldn't stand the idea of all those delicious grapes going to waste. One of our walking friends (people we only see on our twice daily walks) is a welfare mom of two who works on cars, cleans houses for cancer victims and cans anything that comes to her door to stretch out food stamps. I spent an hour or so picking all the grapes I could reach and then presented them to her. A week later she gave me a sealed Mason jar of pink grape juice, which, using her grandma's recipe, will take one year to settle and ferment into --not wine--but grape juice. It's on the shelf. Get back to you next October).

I must say, the grapes are not the only "forgotton" fruit I find on my walk. Pear trees go neglected in people's front yards...the large, ripe fruit falling to the ground to be the food of the voracious bees and hornets.

At the far end of my dog walk route, is another old farm that was deeded to the city as a "park". The city put in a bench and a two picnic tables and occasionally mows, but it's pretty "organic."

And that's a good thing because the old farm's apple and pear trees still continue to produce tons of fruit...all of which falls to the ground.

I'm not above salvaging a windfall fruit or two and having it as my "lunch" as Cherry and I sit on the bench and contemplate the sound of one tail wagging.