Many years ago, knocking around in
my pickup truck, I came upon some abandoned garden allotments that seem once to
have been a part of an abandoned apartment complex. The fencing had long since been removed, and
heavy equipment had been driven around the place, ripping up some cinder blocks
and railroad ties used for making raised tomato beds and leaving the detritus,
along with some bent and ruined Home Depot metal garden stakes, in an ugly
pile. One memory of the garden remained:
a straggly Concord grape vine broken and desiccated in its main branch, but
still sustaining five or six scrappy colonies of green where smaller branches
had fallen to the ground and taken root.
I cut the umbilical cords on the most promising of these, dug it out by
the roots, and took it home. From that
propagation I now have in my yard at least a dozen vines, two of them huge and
arboreal, the others more or less trellised,
Sometimes my granddaughters and I make grape jelly, though in recent
years it’s been all about the wild raspberries, and the birds usually get the
grapes.
Now there is a verse in the Song of
Songs (2:15) that has had a certain significance in my academic work. In the King James Version it is this: “Take
us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender
grapes.” In medieval Christian exegesis
the “vineyard” was widely taken to be an allegorical representation of the
Church. The little foxes spoiling the
vines were therefore a figure of the heretics who troubled the Church. So widely was this allegory accepted that
various actual “heretics” started tocall themselves “the little foxes”. I would occasionally mention this curiosity
in lectures. But of course the danger of
concentrating on an allegorical sense is that the literal sense may be
forgotten entirely.
Our back yard is something of a
wondrous menagerie, which is one of the reasons it so delights young
children. Rare is the summer day in
which one does not see deer, squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, groundhogs—all in
addition to birds in abundance and variety.
This year, since I have had temporarily to abandon cultivating my
vegetable garden at the bottom, animal life is more abundant and more bold than
ever. The “garden” itself, of course, is
rapidly reverting to Stage Two Jersey Jungle.
And on the adjoining open common ground new bird and animal life is
becoming more abundant. On a couple of
occasions a small flock of wild turkeys have paraded past the gap in the
liminal stone walls. And foxes, of which
there have always seemed to be at least one happy family, now seem more numerous. Indeed, one can rarely walk about the Common
Ground without spotting a fox. We now
suspect that a foxy family has taken up residence on our own property, or very
near it.
The other day Joan called me to the
windows at the back. Look, there is a fox walking along the stone
wall! And so, indeed, there was. The wall is quite a long ways off, and the
fox was obviously still a juvenile, but there was no mistaking the pert manner
and the ramrod horizontality of the tail that is so characteristic of a fox on
the run, But the attitude of this
critter was more like a fox on a runway—at a fashion show. This fox was walking along the top of my
stone wall as though it were I-9. Later
on I spotted an adult fox on the open lawn at the bottom of my neighbor’s
contiguous property. There is a memorial
bench about seventy-five yards out into the Common Ground. I sometimes sit on it, and look up from there
to the back of my wall; this big fox was simply sitting there, Fido-like,
looking back at me. Later still, I
finally got the gumption to bushwhack my way into the temporarily abandoned
garden to reclaim a couple of tools.
There I found a mysterious shallow pit, apparent evidence of some barely
begun or abandoned mining operation. But
even then I didn’t put it all together.
What I am calling the “garden” is
pretty well fenced in against deer, and for decorative purposes I have some of
my grapevines trellised against its upper reaches, with the leafing tendrils
beginning at about five feet from the ground.
On one side, where the wire fencing comes close to the abutment of the
stone wall, the vines are already heavily fruited with still very under-ripe
grapes. Well, a couple of days ago we
looked out to see that our young fox was not simply promenading along a
wall. He (or she) was standing on it, using it as a ladder to
get at such of the green grapes as were reachable from the corner of the wall
abutment. The little foxes spoil the
vines! I was able to confirm this later
by an on-site investigation, which revealed evidence of a few ravished green
clusters. In a flash of further biblical
insight, I grasped also the meaning of the small-scale mining operating in the
fallow tomato patch: “Foxes have holes, and birds have nests…” But it was from an ancient secular writer
that I took my comfort: Æsop. I couldn’t
really resent the vulpine foraging.
Those must have been very sour grapes!
