MUSCADINE, DE VINE

by Stumblin' Jimmy Watermelon

n this morning I awoke at the same hour as always but through the half opened blinds of my bedroom window, the world outside was yet a bit darker than usual. Of course it’s been going this way for some time now. It didn’t really start to show much until mid-September. Now the sunrise leaps minutes backward with every passing day. My rising was the same, so too were my shower and breakfast and Ghee (that’s what I call my wife) sleeping soundly all the way through. Only when Pumpkin, our adopted golden retriever, and I ventured outside for our walk and her “rendezvous with nature” did I discern another noticeable change. There was a particular coolness in the air. There was a wisp of the night’s fog still present and dew hung heavy from the oak tree leaves. Their drops rained down in intermittent showers moving from tree to tree as we walked. The branches were jostled by waves of a drier, crisper breeze blowing through the faintly lightening sky. Pumpkin noticed it too. She seemed to shed her summer sluggishness and danced ahead, glancing back at me from time to time with a tail wag and what I’m almost sure was a grin. It was another Monday morning and yet there was something more.

With our stroll and nature’s calling completed (I’m talking about the dog), I settled down a now grumbling hound indoors for the day, quietly closed the front door and slid my middle aged behind into a pickup truck of similar vintage for my drive in to work. Work, that’s a word that I have seldom used in my adult life. Oh, I have labored, and quite hard at times, but it has most always been at least somehow related to my craft and art. Of late though, the market had taken a turn downward for me. It’s all trends you know, lumber and toilets are up and carving and whittlin’ are down. Anyway, I have been spending my weekdays at a government contract job that I landed. It was supposed to be temporary, but by God’s grace, and friends help, my effort (spurned on by Ghee, to be sure) and Uncle Sam’s need, it has been renewed several times to carry me into what has been well over a year now.

Ghee, for the most part, just can’t twinkle nor kiss me enough when I come home after a long day on the job. Oh, she used to give me a smile and such when I’d come back from the wood shop or a day in the woods and out on the river doing field research, you know, for my wildlife carving but I don’t recollect that it was ever presented with such gusto. I’ve been telling myself each morning, “I’m building seed money and paying the bills.” Each evening Ghee has greeted me with a great smile for starters. Working “in the system,” though, having been an “outsider” all my life is like riding a roller coaster on a flat track. Still, in times of what could be a hardship it certainly can bring one’s homecoming expectations up a notch.

Even with Ghee happy and money coming in steady, from time to time I’ve felt the bog of this drudgery. It’s like grape vines wrapping themselves up, around and eventually full over a tree. The grip of them slows its sap, their leaves smothering out your sunlight. That’s where I found myself this morning. It was in full choke and I was definitely feeling the bog. By the time my break for lunch dragged around I had near thought myself up to packing it in. They say, “God brings you what you need, whether you want it or not.” Well I got that part, but in the moment at hand, needed or not and common sense lost in the muck, I was leanin’ towards not wantin’ it any more!

My point of self-convincing had just about reached that downward slide into stupidity. It was then that one of the other men in our crew, as if on cue, pulled out a bag of muscadine grapes to share with us all. Passing the bag around, he said that they came from his own arbor. His granddaughter had helped him pick them just the other day. He couldn’t have known, but some of the best days of my childhood’s freedom were spent in the shade of an island arbor. With a good friend, somehow before this moment forgotten, we’d climbed among its vines and thrilled in the adventure. Pulling those purple, leathery muscadines from their stems we’d eaten to our contentment. Now as I savored my offered share, those days all came rushing back, and in that, found what had seemed so lost. Strangled vines and grape leaf metaphors aside, it was the fruit that saved me.

October has already begun. This fall will turn me a good harvest, no doubt. Winter is in the bag and spring is sure to find me ready and back outside. I’ve bottled up some of those grapes. In a short two years they’ll make good wine. I’ll call it, “Muscadine, De Vine.