Cora and Lulu, in Concord
One of the nicer biblical prophecies of the Peaceable
Kingdom, from Micah, proclaims
that “they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none
shall make them afraid.” I like to
apply this thought to my pleasant state of retirement. As a student of literature, I know the
difference between the literal and the metaphoric. Nonetheless I have tried on numerous occasions to cultivate
my own fig tree. They do grow around here, and I have even
seen a few flourishing ones. My
friend and former GP, Genuino Nazzaro, who lives hardly half a mile from here,
has one sufficiently fecund to supply me, from time to time, with a luscious
compote whipped up by his wife Dina.
I, however, don’t seem to have the knack; over the years I have murdered,
by slow torture, a small orchard of fig saplings. I’ve done considerably better on the grapevine front,
however.
Our
first abode in Princeton was in the high-rise Hibben Apartments nestled in the
corner formed by Lake Carnegie and the railroad tracks. This was one of two large boxes—the
other being Magie—in which most of the junior faculty of the Princeton of the
Sixties resided. As there were
nearly two hundred units, our numerous fellow apartment-dwellers included quite
a few destined for academic fame.
We lived on the seventh floor at the top of the ventilation shaft that
on the first floor passed through the apartment of the Giamattis. Bart Giamatti would later become the
President of Yale and later still the Commissioner of Baseball. We used to pick up the aroma of the
Giamattis’ cooking (mainly Italian) and the distant discontents of their baby,
now the actor Paul Giamatti. Quite apart from such olfactory brushes
with greatness, some of our life-long friendships date from that era.
Hibben
and Magie were recently torn down.
On the lakeside site a whole little village of townhouses, now nearing
completion, will replace them.
Buildings do come and go around here. The Music Building was built, torn down, and magnificently
replaced all during the continuing tenure of my 1990 Toyota! Still, there goes yet another fugitive
monument of material flemingiana.
Sometime
shortly after we moved out and into a real house, roughly in the middle of the
Age of Aquarius, some apartment dwellers founded a large communal vegetable
garden in the waste land beside the tracks. Enthusiasm waned all too soon, alas, and it was
abandoned. About a decade later
the garden site was bulldozed to make room for yet more cars. Of course all this had been foretold by
the prophetess Joni Mitchell: They paved
paradise and put up a parking lot.
Knocking around this destruction site one day with one of my kids, we
found that the dozer had savaged and broken up various rooted fragments of what
must have been a substantial Concord grape vine. We tossed a few into the back of the truck.
The
rest is history, because two of these mangled uvial disjecta membra, when
reverently buried in my garden, sprang into life the following spring. They became the matriarchs of a veritable
woodland vineyard surrounding my property. I decided then and there that my gardening skills were
probably better suited to a plant that could be cultivated by road grader than
one so apparently temperamental as the fig. Thus I bagged the idea of the fig tree, settling for
multiple grapevines instead. One of the offspring of the original detritus now
covers and softens my garden shed.
Another two vines, while I was not watching, climbed up large conifers,
challenging them to mortal combat.
Several others, more carefully managed, have created a screen replacing
three holly trees destroyed by a hurricane.
Now
of course one hopes that a grapevine might produce grapes. Mine have been pretty prolific, but in
a wild and wasteful way. The ones
on the shed roof either get eaten by birds or shriveled against the hot
roofing. Most of the others dangle
in clumps twenty or thirty feet above my head. This year, however, things have been different. The first of what I imagine as a rather
elaborate network of bamboo trellises has supported and protected the
grapes. One of the huge old
conifers, broken in half by the wind two years ago, has become a kind of
volunteer trellis, with some of its grapes, at least, now in reach.
Under
these circumstances I invited the two resident granddaughters to help me with
the harvest, and if they wished, to report, as guest bloguistas, on their
activities. On account of the
generational trope, working with my granddaughters amid the vines was
particularly satisfying for me. If
you think about the medieval artistic motif of the “Tree of Jesse,” the tree is
after all really a vine. Lulu is
into poetry at the moment. So she penned
a postmodern effort that begins “Jeepers!
Jumping jars of jovial jam!”
Jesuitical jihadists! This poem rather strays from the point
in its attempt to preserve the rhythms of Piers
Plowman; so I omit the rest.
However Bloguista Cora offers the following sober and accurate account
in prose.
Every
summer, the grapes in Grandad’s front yard are ripe. This year, there was the biggest amount of grapes growing
that there had been for years (according to Grandad.) One day, Grandad invited my sister and me to help pick the
grapes and make grape jelly with him.
Of course, my sister and I agreed.
So that afternoon I was in the front yard with Grandad and a bucket in
my hand. Most of that afternoon we
picked the grapes, removed them from their stems, and put them all in one big
bucket. After a search for his
jelly strainer, Grandad got to work on making the famous grape jelly.
After
the jelly was finished we took a muffin, split it into three, and spread the
butter and the homemade jelly on the muffin. The three of us bit into our muffins in triumph. The grape jelly was delicious,
definitely a 5 star Jelly. We made
enough jelly to last us until Christmas but because it was delicious, I think
it will probably only last about 11/2 weeks.
Cora Louise Fleming-Benite
