Wild Grapes

Dear Diary,

It is strange how a smell can open the flood gates of memory.  I was out picking up a few stray branches in the driveway and I smelled it.  Clear and distinctive, the smell of ripe wild grapes.  There is a vine at the corner of the driveway that goes up a tree...deep purple Concord Grapes.  They have grown there for as long as I've owned the house probably "planted" by a passing bird years ago.

That smell, which reaches its peak after the first light frost, says autumn to me.  We had a magnificent grape arbor in our yard when I was a child and when they smelled like this it was time to pick them.  My grandmother would make her amazing grape jelly each fall and I still have her jelly bag which would hang from a wooden rod between two chairs to let the juice slowly drip out.

I am not sure why my father cut the vine down.  It might have become diseased.  My mother planted a Trumpet Vine to take its place.  I know I missed those vines and picking the grapes with my grandfather and, of course, the home-made jelly.  Store bought never tasted the same to me.  Standing there in my drive, smelling those wild grapes, I could close my eyes and be six years old again.  Isn't memory a wonderful thing....