Clippety Thicketry

This past weekend we were wending down the ever-winding Highway 33 on our way to an auction, when we again passed through the village where Leo and Leona formerly owned a tavern (Leo and Leona were and still are locally famous for that tavern); and there we saw that the rows of grape vines, unruly-looking only weeks ago, are now trimmed and ready for the new season. The vines are obviously older than ours. This makes the contrast even greater than it is in our vines, between the twisty-gnarled trunks and the spindly remaining branches.

It was hard for me to accept how severely a vine is to be pruned, to maintain vigor. The vine's incredible growth during the summer seems a wonderful achievement: so how ungrateful and unappreciative it seems, to take the steel nippers to that boisterous botanical accomplishment, that wild-hair tangly jumble of vines ... and to do so sneakily, just when the grape is for all purposes looking the other way -- during that long winter nap.

To the eye, the thickety unclipped wildness looks like it will burst forth luxuriantly in spring -- which it will, indeed, given the chance. Yet you discover that the spareness of the pruned-back vine bursts forth with luxuriance enough -- and in fact with an appropriate luxuriance, since the vineyard's reason for being is the growing of fruit as opposed to greenery.

I grew abundancies of leaves on some vines, last season. As opposed to fruit. In other words, I was still in the process of accepting this necessity.

Cheers ...

Realistic

Is there anything more difficult to acquire than a realistic expectation?

The problem is that you cannot know what to expect of a place unless you have been there -- and unless you know what has transpired in that place since the last time you were there.

The problem is further that if you have an expectation about a place you hope to reach, then you yourself are a part of the conditions leading to your being in that place -- and, too, are a part of the place itself, once you have achieved it and are there.

(I was thinking about publishing, among other matters, in jotting down the above -- and now am visualizing grape vines in late summer laden with fruit, and covered with protective netting -- that the voracious birds get under anyway.)

Cheers ...

Tugging the Wires

One unexpected pleasure in working with grape vines is that of working with wire. Sunday after pruning I tightened the wires strung along the two grape rows, using a pair of pliers that happened to be in my coat pocket -- the wrong ones, but the ones at hand -- and my bare hands.

When I first strung the wire I was pleased to find how useful certain old pliers are. Picked up in auction batches of old tools, these are various pliers that have no teeth or serrations for gripping: so they bend and turn wire without damaging it, which over the long run might weaken it. One pair -- you might think of a squared duck's bill, to imagine its jaws -- is especially good for twisting two strands together.

I use steel posts to support the wire, something that may need to change, at some point. So far, though, it seems adequate, even though it means the upper wire is not as high as might be desired.

This morning I was wrestling with the structure of my current book -- doing my best to stretch the supporting wires taut, as it were. Had I known at the beginning of writing the book what I now understand, I might not have to struggle so, in tugging it into a somewhat straight line. Yet it seems never the case that you understand what to do until you are done doing it. (Which is a thought that, this year, calls to mind my raising the southeast porch of the house, which was sagging. By the time I truly knew what I was doing, the job was done. I could undo it now, and do it again better ... but will I? Ha!)

The grape-support wires sagged last summer under weight of vines and grapes -- and certainly my early structure for my book was inadequate for containing the turnings of ideas and knowledge that I encountered and gained, while actually writing.

Cheers ...