Muscadines
On Friday when I was walking the dogs, I found muscadines at the edge of the woods. I had known there was a vine there because I found a grape on the road the week before. I hooked Zoe's leash to a sapling, slipped Gitta's leash over my arm, and tried to take pictures, pick muscadines, and keep Gitta from mouthing all the grapes I dropped. (She seems to investigate things with her mouth as much as she does with her nose. I can't tell you how many acorns she picks up and drops while we're walking along.) Oddly, I didn't have a bandana with me, so I put the muscadines in my hat to carry them home. Before getting back on the road, I had to stick my face in the hat and breathe deep.
My two strongest sense memories are mothballs and wet wool (early childhood, Scotland) and muscadines. When I was ten, eleven, twelve, Daddy would take the pickup truck and drive us out into the woods wherever he'd seen muscadines, and we'd gather them. Daddy would climb and shake trees if he had to, or we'd stand in the bed of the truck to reach the vines, and we'd get a big bucket of them sometimes. Mama canned them in jars of water or light syrup, and we served the juice mixed with fizzy water at holidays. It was our non-alcoholic "champagne."
Muscadines are just a variety of wild grape. (They can be cultivated as well.) They have a very tough red-purple skin and a unique, dark element to their scent. Nothing else smells and tastes like a muscadine. I kept my hatful of muscadines in my bedroom all weekend, catching a whiff of them several times a day. I had them in the kitchen when my brother came over, and he said he could smell them as soon as he came in, even though he had a cold.
To eat them, you have to pop the skin open, which you can do in mouth, or if you're being dainty, use a sharp knife to slice a slit in the skin. Then you squeeze the grape into your mouth and work the slippery membrane around until you can slide the seeds to the front of your mouth, hold them between your lips while you chew and swallow the rest. The first taste is sweet, then sour, especially if you chew the skin some more to get more juice out.
There you go, one of my favorite things. I think it's so special because it's rare, or at least seasonal, and it instantly makes me feel eleven, with mid-autumn gold sunlight and crunchy leaves and my dad taking me out in the woods.
My two strongest sense memories are mothballs and wet wool (early childhood, Scotland) and muscadines. When I was ten, eleven, twelve, Daddy would take the pickup truck and drive us out into the woods wherever he'd seen muscadines, and we'd gather them. Daddy would climb and shake trees if he had to, or we'd stand in the bed of the truck to reach the vines, and we'd get a big bucket of them sometimes. Mama canned them in jars of water or light syrup, and we served the juice mixed with fizzy water at holidays. It was our non-alcoholic "champagne."
Muscadines are just a variety of wild grape. (They can be cultivated as well.) They have a very tough red-purple skin and a unique, dark element to their scent. Nothing else smells and tastes like a muscadine. I kept my hatful of muscadines in my bedroom all weekend, catching a whiff of them several times a day. I had them in the kitchen when my brother came over, and he said he could smell them as soon as he came in, even though he had a cold.
To eat them, you have to pop the skin open, which you can do in mouth, or if you're being dainty, use a sharp knife to slice a slit in the skin. Then you squeeze the grape into your mouth and work the slippery membrane around until you can slide the seeds to the front of your mouth, hold them between your lips while you chew and swallow the rest. The first taste is sweet, then sour, especially if you chew the skin some more to get more juice out.
There you go, one of my favorite things. I think it's so special because it's rare, or at least seasonal, and it instantly makes me feel eleven, with mid-autumn gold sunlight and crunchy leaves and my dad taking me out in the woods.