Childhood Home for Sale

After dancing around it like a maypole, you and I sat in its shadows, laughing, squishing the translucent, gooey grapes into our mouths, throwing the dark paper skins into the summer sky, spitting the seeds.   It was just a season or two after dad trimmed it too much and we thought it would certainnly die that we ate its grapes with our eyes on mom and dad, hoping they both tasted sweetness at the same time.  

We picked colanders full of the concord grapes and brought them inside, some cracked with juices attracting fruit flies.  

In late August, brown with sun, hair stiff from pool water,  we’d slip around back to see if the grapes were ripe.  We’d part the branches, crawl under the weighted arbor, where bunches hung free among spiders.  Handfuls of gummy sweetness into our mouthes, we strewed seeds around us, giggling, chewing gemmy morsels.

This Victorian grapevine that someone planted long ago, that survived the tornado of ’69, gave us so many seasons of fruit.  Even when the Japanese beetles seemed to stir its every leaf, even when the neighborhood kids picked and threw so many grapes at each other rather than eat them,  there was always enough.

One year mom made a circular garden and dad planted an apple tree beside that grapevine.  The apple tree matured and gave bitter, hideous, bulbous fruit.  The ciruclar garden was overgrown with weeds, torn up, and hissing, mutilated, inbred cats crept in.

The vine was just out of view from our childhood bedroom window.  We grew up,  it grew dense, neglected, like a forgotten elder.   The fertile field behind our house became pre-fabricated, chem-lawned home plots.  A floodlit parking lot replaced the restful darkness of night.