Vineyard Days

"Look out for rabbits!" Grandpa shouts as we pass Jim on the old riding mower. Jim's sister ran over a baby bunny last year, and this is Grandpa's idea of a joke. As we drive onto the farm in Mechanicsville, Maryland, Uncle Gerald points out posts that they put up last week and Grandpa starts talking about all of the recent changes to the property, but to me it's the same white trash vineyard. The corn on the neighboring lot is overgrown and old bicycle wheels and plastic milk cartons top posts across the property. As we pull to a stop, I ask where to find my dad and Grandpa takes a good hard look at me, as if maybe after my long flight I'm not ready to do any real work. "Your father's in lot thirteen."

I run past the old tobacco barn, around the tool shed, up the hill, past the outhouse, through the long lot of Christmas trees, winding in and out of lots eleven and twelve until I find Dad clipping leaves in a row labeled Sangiovese. He turns only briefly. "Do you know how to prune the Marsanne?" I have never heard of Marsanne. "Go over to lot seven by your grandfather's truck and clip every leaf that comes between the sun and the grapes," Dad says. "It should take about 30 minutes a row, for ten rows." So I leave, this time not running quite so fast.

Grandpa and Uncle Gerald go home to Virginia after a few days and for a while it's just me and my Dad. Some days, Dad has to stay home and work for his real job, and he drops me off at the farm at seven with an assignment. "Each offshoot of Tinta Cao should only have two bunches on it," he says, "Any more and they won't get enough sunlight or sugar." So I spend a day cutting excess bunches off of the Tinta Cao. Another day he gives me an old pretzel jar full of yellow plastic clips and tells me to patch up every hole I can find in the netting around the vineyard. The work isn’t difficult or exhausting, but it isn’t interesting either. I write and rewrite poems in my head, but I forget them all by the time I get back to the house. I sing out as loud as I want, but soon I tire of hearing my own voice. I make mental lists of foods to cook and notes on grapes and funny anecdotes so that I can tell everyone back home about my summer, but those, too, leave my memory as quickly as they enter. The thick, hot summer air is anything but refreshing, but it's not as though leaf clipping and beetle catching is strenuous labor. Am I, a girl so easily distracted by my own thoughts during lectures and problem sets, really incapable of occupying my mind for a few weeks? Haven’t I ever learned to handle boredom? I ask Dad how he keeps busy but he just shrugs. “You gotta stop thinking so much and just do the work.” I don’t know what to do with this.

Dad loves Maryland. He loves waking up at six o'clock to put up nets and pick leaves for nine, ten hours at a time, stopping only for a roast beef sandwich with hummus and horseradish sauce around noon, and spending his weekends fixing up the 200-year-old house with the caving roof and the mismatched wallpapers. He loves the seclusion of manual labor, the close community of farmers, and the spontaneity of coming home and grilling a pizza with fresh Amish-made cheese and tomatoes. I don’t mind Maryland, but in the real world I live on change, on coffee shops and movie nights and spontaneous baking parties, not on monotonous labor and definitely not on isolation. Dad gets sick of the busy city and his desk job as a software developer, but I don’t know what he finds so thrilling about pruning vines.

Tuesday and Friday afternoons we leave the farm early, and I go to the Amish farmers' market in the library parking lot to get corn on the cob and red potatoes and fresh bread. I stop to talk with the vendors there, savoring the rare moments of social interaction and listening to their discussions about whose mother made that quilt and how much sugar they use in their jellies. I realize that these people must work, that even though I only see them at the market and on the rare occasions when Dad drives to one of their farms to buy fresh eggs or plywood, they too spend most of their lives in the fields. They aren’t solemn about it like Dad is and they aren’t escaping from a busy other life; the market is probably just as much an escape for them as it is for me. But there are helpful old men and sweet women and friendly children! How do they stand this? How do they keep from running off into the fields, from playing pranks on each other and sneaking blueberries as they bake? Are they lonely too?

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One mid-August day around noon we get a call from my mother in Seattle. “Some lady called our house… Diana or Deedee or something… it was four in the morning and someone told her to call the home number… I don’t think she realized we live on the West Coast.”

“What did she want?” Dad asks.

“Oh I don’t know, she heard about the harvest maybe? I think she wanted to help, I told her I’d give her your number but it was four o’clock in the morning honey. Here, you can call her.”

And so we get to know Deborah. Nobody is quite sure where she came from or how she heard about the vineyard but we’re ready to accept any help we can get. On a Friday night just over a week later, Uncle Gerald and Grandpa come up to the house and we are out early Saturday morning to harvest the Chardonnay. We are met at the farm by two middle aged women in baseball caps and work boots, and boy are they ready. “So what are we harvesting today?” “Did you hear about the hurricane? Is that going to affect anything?” “Why do we harvest this one first?” “What’s the technical difference between a red and a white wine?” and my personal favorite, “This isn’t going to be messy, is it?” Uncle Gerald takes the crates out of his truck and begins to explain the harvesting process. Deborah raises her hand before interrupting him with “So what do we do with all the—you know—bad grapes?” Uncle Gerald responds that any grape is a good grape, but if we find some that are underripe, we can leave them on the vine in their natural state.” Natural? I think. This mess of a farm is natural? We go into the vineyard and pick eight long rows of Chardonnay, Grandpa and I listening in amusement as Lois and Deborah continue to bombard my father and uncle with questions on this intriguing science.

“Oh my God!” we hear a voice say, “What is this thing on my hand?”

And then another soon after it, “Good gracious, what’s that? Gerald? Peter? We have an emergency over here!”

Uncle Gerald laughs. “Oh that’s just a Japanese beetle; you can squish him if you want.”

“In my bare hands? Can it bite me? Do you have hand sanitizer?”

I find myself wishing these women would leave, wanting to tell them to calm down and appreciate the monotonous calm of vineyard work. Haven’t they learned to stop thinking so much and just do the work?

The winds begin to pick up and Uncle Gerald turns on his car radio for hurricane updates. Weather advisory in effect for Northeastern Virginia, Southern Maryland, Delaware. Heavy winds and rains expected. Possible flooding and power outages. “We’ll pick the last two rows and then go home to stomp,” Dad says.

“In a hurricane?” Lois asks.

“Aw you’re not afraid of hurricanes are you?” says Grandpa. “Who told these girls they could work here? We have standards you know.” Winds increasing, cars are advised to stay off of the road.

We collect eight crates of grapes and return to the house, where Dad has already set up a large tub for stomping. The wind is getting stronger and a few branches are already down in the backyard, but the porch of the old house is relatively stable and these men will stop at nothing for their grapes. As Uncle Gerald finishes setting up the equipment, Dad says “Erin, why don’t you go first?” I take off my shoes and socks as Grandpa directs Deborah and Lois in pouring the grape bunches into the tub. Uncle Gerald’s car radio is still on. Winds in St. Mary’s County reach sixty miles per hour. I wipe my feet off with a cloth and then stand in a small bucket of sanitizer for thirty seconds.

Deborah stares. “So that’s really how they do it?”

Lois gawks. “You’re not taking a shower or anything?”

Grandpa rolls his eyes. “Don’t we have standards around here?”

I step into the tub of grapes, feeling the cool juices ooze out as grape skins break beneath my feet. I walk around the tub, everywhere I step they crack open and the sweet green grape juice begins to accumulate. Thirty feet away, a falling branch narrowly misses the tool shed. At eighty miles per hour, these are now hurricane force winds in Southern Maryland. I begin jumping up and down and the grapes pop like bubble wrap.

“Your turn!” Uncle Gerald tells Deborah.

“Oh no no no,” she insists. “Grape stomping is for children, I could never do that.” I am not a child. Uncle Gerald presses her. “I just don’t do well with messes,” Deborah says.

“Well what are you doing on a vineyard?” Grandpa nearly bellows. The wind blows a plastic chair off the porch. Heavy rainfall already present in St. Charles County, flooding in Northern Virginia, rain is expected to hit St. Mary’s County in a matter of minutes.

Lois pipes up. “I’ll try stomping.” She takes off her shoes and socks and rinses her feet in the sanitizer, squealing as she sticks a foot in the juicy mess. The wind blows down another branch and I worry that the leaves that race around the yard will end up in our tub of grapes.

“How much juice is this?” Lois asks.

“Not too much, maybe 300 pounds,” Dad says.

“Three hundred?” Deborah stares.

“Are these the same bottles you can buy in the supermarket?” Lois asks.

“So I can go home and tell my friends I stomped grapes for real Southern Maryland wine, like they sell in Food Lion?” Deborah asks.

Grandpa snorts. “Not if you never take off your shoes.”

Deborah gets in the tub, giggling and squawking for a good five minutes before Dad drains all of the juice out and there is nothing left for Lois and Deborah to stomp. The wind has quickly been joined with a downpour and rain hits the house from all directions. Dad corks up the last vat of grape juice to ferment for a few months and I help him bring the glass vessels to the cool wine cellar. Accumulations of two to three inches of rain expected within the hour. We drive to Charlie’s Crabhouse in the downpour and watch hurricane coverage on the twelve inch TV screen that goes in and out of focus with each new gust of wind.