Tomorrow

Late summer days in a vineyard, the bounty borne by years of patient nurture drips from the vines.

Aromella clusters in the South Vineyard, September 2014

Clusters of amber, bronze, apricot, and deep purple bear a perilous, and transitory, prosperity.

With each passing day under a slanting September sun, the color deepens.

The fruit sweetens.

As the crop ripens, birds circle overhead, menacingly.

We worry about our perilous prosperity, borne as fragile fruit.

On misty vineyard mornings, a doe and her speckled fawns seek to breach the bird netting, and sample forbidden fruit.

As the poet observed, nothing gold can stay.

And that goes for September, which swept in with a blaze of goldenrod along the creek bed, and the transitory bounty of the crop this golden month bears.

Before we turn the page to October and autumn’s demise, all of the fruit, or that which does not succumb to the appetite of the creatures with whom we share this temporary paradise, will be harvested from the vines.

Frontenac Gris in the North Vineyard, September 2014

Our winged and hoofed friends sweep in to glean what remains.

There comes a day, after the last harvest, when we walk the denuded vineyard rows, where the jeweled tones of the crop we nurtured are replaced by lemon yellow leaves, with the first crinkles of brown fringing their edges.

The skeletal remains of rejected grape clusters, stripped clean by crows, litter the vineyard turf.

We’ll allow ourselves our moment of melancholy.

And then we shift gears to next year, the bounty of future harvests, the rich nectar now safely aging in winery tanks.

A sign on a piece of aged barn wood in my backyard reads: to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.

In the vineyard it is perpetually tomorrow.

No sooner are the last grapes plucked from the vines, than attention turns to next year.

Furrows are tilled.

Bird netting rolled.

Nursery orders placed.

Canada geese, flying in a perfect wedge, migrate overhead. Their somber call dissipates into the horizon.

On these October days of fading goldenrod, something about the plaintive wail of migrating birds makes me think that they understand what we ourselves have come to know:

Each tomorrow brings us closer to another golden season, a tomorrow in which we dream of another bountiful harvest, dripping from the vines, in extravagant jeweled tones.

The bounty of our acres, on display at our harvest festival, September 2014.