Wild Grapes

Memory and Practical Advice.

Dear Reader—

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho Anne Carson (Translator)

It’s as warm as summer except for a fall feel in the air you breathe, in a coolness and angle of the goldenness of the sun. The way it hits the old grey fence post is bittersweet, except you don’t know that word yet and you are with your whole family. This open, rolling, country where kids and parents can spread out a bit. Back in the woods at the start of this walk you found a proper walking stick on the forrest floor and you saw the shaggy vines that went straight up like ropes. You can feel your backpack on your back with a snack in it, and your wool sweater itchy at the neck and rubber boots a bit too loose, but you are ready for anything and along the path you know, across the field, the high dock weed shakes its dark red rust seed head and the milkweed crackly and opened like a boat. Its silky floating with the last monarch orange flag important and praising across the sky and over the sharp grasses a few dew drops perfect and round, strung across spider’s web twang, catching crickets. Over a dip in the land where you might suddenly sink a bit into muck up to almost the top of your boot, and you think of quicksand in a cartoon for a second, and a sucking, but then you are easily free and out of this marshiness to the far field where the path gets vaguer and you stick closer to your family and make for a patch of trees. Up close you see their lichen spots and their hermit shapes and the last of their speckled leaves. They must be apple or pear trees gone back to nature and you are in some abandoned orchard. There is a kind of old order to the landscape here. Paths half-human half-fox that lead you along, and your papa looks for the ruins of the burned-down house but you follow your mama who is drawn to another shape. The light is changed here behind the orchard and there is a kind of shaping that does not yet make sense: a kind of hulking soft shoulder but the shoulder is made of calm grey-green rock with green moss and it smells like a stream in the forrest. It is all minerals. Drinking from this rock is a thousand vines of years, and years slumped over this ruin of a foundation of a barn or stone wall. It is so old it’s impossible to tell and your mother says their name. Wild grapes. And you see that the living wall is all vines. Circling it you see that some of the vines are old and tangled and spiralling, and some are red or green and just growing with all their greenness. And the leaves and the light here make the scene look like Roman or Greek or some place before all of that. Crete? Phoenicia? Narnia? You follow your mama through a kind of arch made mostly of vines and inside there now you are inside a place. And here, in this place, surrounded by a church of old stone and seeking vines, you see them. Tiny, black-purple perfect spheres in clusters. In this one place. They look like tiny grapes but they are not like anything in any refrigerator or grocery store. You mama says try one, and they are the right size for your fingers and you can see each one perfect on its woody stem and you can see which one is the darkest, the most flavourful, the most velvet and the most purple. You know even without tasting a single one yet that this cluster of fruits is all the effort of all of these vines and the quiet unexplainable work of all of this day and the days before it and the cold cold nights coaxing sugar, and the limestone and the rain and the golden sun and the green green leaves, and all of these energies are here. You do not yet know the world intensified but you feel it in your fists. Its colour waiting, vibrating almost with medicine. You hear the word goblet in your head because that is a word you learned and you know that you will not eat this wild grape, you will drink it. The taste is everything I have just written. You will forget some of this and you will keep on trying to explain it to friends and lovers and your own children, on paper, in notebooks, in words and in pixels, in childrens’ book proposals, and in tiny glass vials shipped off to writers and poets and friends. And still and always you will be at a loss for a way to explain the regal, velvety purple alive humility of wild grapes that whispered to you that first time. And then, forty years later, a word comes to you. It is reverent. —JL

Meanwhile…..In the Colour Lab this week: Finding, Collecting, Making, Storing and Modifying wild grape ink.

Finding:
Watch for wild grapes along a split rail fence on the side of dirt road, or along a chainlink fence at the side of railway tracks. Their vines also climb trees and bushes and telephone poles but these grapes end up high in the air and difficult to collect. There are some slight variations between fox grapes and river grapes and few other wild varieties but they all make a good rich purple ink. Watch out for look-alikes like porcelain berries (beautiful but not that juicy),