. Spinning .

A picture would’ve been better, but I was too embarrassed to holler for help and a camera. I got hung up in the grapes this morning.   

You know how even though you’re afraid of heights you find yourself on the top rung of the ladder because you are so focused on what you’re painting that you reach up and up with the brush, another board, another couple inches, and unwittingly your feet adjust for your short arms and take another step without telling you?  Then you look down and freeze.  I’ve done that.  Twice.  Once Jim saved me and once Andy the neighbor as he mowed by and realized I hadn’t moved at all in ten minutes.

Anyhow, that’s what happened this morning.  One final picking, just cause they’re there and will be wasted and I can make one more batch of jelly since if I get a full time job outside the house I won’t have time to do these nature-woman things anymore.  One luscious purple cluster led to another and another until I found myself rather deep into a tangle of brush and raspberry vines wrapped around my ankles with their teeny little needle thorns gripping in.  Something had my hair locked in its grasp from one direction then another.  Left sleeve caught up by a branch and bracelets on the right hooked around a bunch of grape leaves and got worse with trying to pull free. I felt so dopey I could cry.

No one around to see me in my silly misery, no one to help.  Damned if I’d let myself be found someday come spring, a skeleton held fast among the twigs and branches in the field. Clutching the precious treasure to my chest delicately so as not to squash them all against my shirt, I struggled, pulled, moved backward, raspberries tearing at my legs, my hair pulled out by stubborn trees, shirt untorn but marked by scars, and stumbled free.  Picked up my bag of booty and happily went home.

And you’re the only ones who know it and I can’t hear you laugh.

If I ever get a full time job, I wonder what I’d do come harvest? 

This morning, picking the last ripe grapes, I hear a familiar hum, the hummingbird behind me, wondering what I am doing there.   I realize that she is one of those who’ve sucked the sweet juice from a random grape.  I leave some for her and her friends’ enjoyment.

There are two types of grapes that live here, so a varietal wine is what I suppose I make.  What types?  Honda is the one on the left, started from clippings of vines growing behind the Torrington Honda dealership.

The other is Hatchery.  Plants started off from those that grew on the gate to the driveway of the fish hatchery just up the road.

Later, the kitchen smelling like a winery, I hand wash the grapes, knowing that no winery will be near as meticulous as I with sorting out the good grapes from the flawed by bugs or hummingbirds.  I hear her, drawn by the perfume of the fruit, she hovers just outside the window above my sink, looking in at me, squeaking her dismay at what I’ve done.

Peaches next.  The poor trees bending underneath the weight.  Rather silly looking, too, the line of trees down below that for the first time in their lives are producing a reasonable number.  But so tiny and cute!  And I did not have the heart to fully pinch some off.

This is a blessed year for harvest and I’ve no time to do much else between the picking, sorting, washing, squishing, boiling, sweetening, canning of the fruit.

How could I ever work full time at harvest time?

The frugal waste-not nature of my mother and my father that too sadly slipped by one of my sisters makes me pause mid-field and without my mind’s control my feet take me to the apple tree, the one that Bandit–the horse that Jim and I call Frito (Bandito) and fed carrots to and cabbage–used to reach up for and nibble on, that looks much like a toddler’s drawing with a puffy green cloud scattered here and yon with ripe-red balls, all stuck together on a stick.

But Frito’s gone now many years and uneaten apples get the opportunity to turn yellow, red and dangle in my vision, transforming, steaming, covered cinnamony and sugar into pie.

Can’t help it.  I trudge back to the house with t-shirt bottomed belly pregnant with the fruit.

Grapes are growing on the peach trees, the peach trees planted themselves in the vegetable garden from fallen fruit, there’s a grapevine in the path in the back yard, and more on trees in my neighbor’s yard where Andy threw the pruned cuttings away. 

Now the raspberries, once kept in two neat rows have been abandoned there, to leap via nature’s vehicle of birds to attack the overgrown grape arbors.

Me, I wander freely following the ripening fruit.

At CVS Pharmacy this morning, I tell the manager behind the counter not to order "my" cigarettes anymore–they used to hide a box for me under the counter.  She loudly congratulated me, told the other girl I’ve stopped smoking and she congratulated and wished me luck as well.

The next stop, Ron’s Agway, where both Ron (my age and recently divorced) and Adam, a great kid (20) who wants to be a geologist, tell me I’m lookin’ good.  I tell them I stopped smoking and Ron said yeah, but there’s more to it; that I look happier and less stressed out.  Yeah, I grin; a three-year long cloud finally has, I think, cleared out.

Small towns are neat that way because you know each other.  But small towns have bears.  64 sightings in the last one-year period.  Only two towns have a higher number:  71 in Granby up near the MA border; and Simsbury leads with 74.  Of course that could be a single bear who likes to take a daily hike.