The Grape Tradition

I had an unexpected wonderful experience that I figured I would share with all my friends around me. I was telling my friend Julie about it after it happened, and she said that it was definitely a hippie moment, so if this changes your opinion of me, I am sorry, I can’t be helped.

Yesterday, we shoved three kids in the car (Audrey, Copper and Daphne) and headed out to a farm. Our intention was to go apple picking and bring home pounds and pounds of apples, but there was something else in store for us.

It turns out that the apple crop was esperacially awful this season, so there are no spare apples that the farmers want to allow for u-picking. The only thing that was available was grapes. After some deliberation, we decided that we would be able to do something with the 20 pounds of grapes we needed to pick and we set out for the field.

Julie’s littlest kid Copper is amazing. She has an amazing way of doing the cutest things at the most crazy of times. She was wearing a polka dot dress over a polka dot skirt and she had on some Robeez. It was the perfect outfit in the environment she was in. It wasn’t exactly practical, but it was definitely adorable. Copper lagged behind as we walked down the dirt road and if you looked back to see her, you would see that she was doing any number of totally adorable things, from picking up rocks to confronting as long as she possible could the dog that happily bound up to her.

It was the perfect day, not too hot, not too cold, and I was out with some good company and some adorable kids to pick grapes for preserves.

And then my moment—a long moment, happened. There I was with my baby strapped to me walking through the rows of grapes in the late September sun. The grapes hung down and crawled along the ground while the purple jewels of goodness were waiting for us to pick them. I ducked under the vines to go up to pick some grapes, and the way that the sun was glowing through the leaves put me back into time. It was like reliving all of the magic that I felt while I was a part of history on my Greek island of Paros. It was like I was there picking grapes as many thousands of my ancestors have done. Though my final intentions were not to make wine with the grapes, I was still partaking in the late September harvest of one of the most traditionally cultivated fruits in history.

I felt sorry for all the sorry sods in their offices or at work looking out their cement walls waiting for 5pm when they would be stuck in traffic. I got a chance to take part in a tradition that had been going on for thousands of years. I picked grapes with the sun streaming through the vines as many thousands of my ancestors have done over the past many thousands of years.