Abstractions on love and grapes

A few years back I had a friend try Concord grapes that I had bought. This friend was very surprised by the taste. She said, “Oh, it tastes like purple popsicles.”

This was remarkable to me for two reasons:

1. Are we really at the point in our national diet that artificial flavors are our base experience, and the natural flavor is the abstraction?
2. I’ve had a fairly earthy life so far, growing up around vineyards, farm stands, real cows, etc. I forget that these things are soooo far away from the urban childhood.

You may cut me off at the pass here and realize that I’m trying to get myself excited about going home to Le Victoire. I called my mother last night to tell her I’d be able to make it home for the Beanie’s birthday (she’s turning four.) My mother broke out in tears of joy. TEARS OF JOY, people.

She asked me, as she always does, if there’s anything I’d like to eat while I’m home. This is sweetness masking compliment-fishing. I suppose that’s okay.

“Concord grapes,” I said, musing on the fact that I haven’t been able to get them in the city yet this year.

“Concord grapes,” she repeated, unenthused. I think she hoped to hear, “Gee, Mom, I’ve been dying to get a taste of your spaghetti sauce.” I have, actually, but I had this nightmare vision of the hours spent rolling meatballs, the masses of Tupperware (because she always makes way too much), the days of teasing tomato stains out of linens. In our house, nothing is simple. Even spaghetti sauce comes with guilt and grief.

Concord grapes stain, too, I realize. She’ll probably go to the extreme and try to make a grape pie, which is the most tedious pastry ever invented. Ever de-seeded 200 grapes to find that you still don’t have enough to fill a pie shell? It’s a special kind of hell. You lean over the sink, back aching, eyes blurring, fingers raw, deep red stains up your arms to the elbow. It is NO FUN.

Of course, there’s a part of me that loves my mother for wanting to do these things in my honor. There’s a part of me that wants a red carpet unfurled when I go home because, goddammit, it’s hard for me. There should be some kind of reward for going through it all, right?

That sentiment doesn’t last, though, as I sit on the couch at night, up later than my parents, and they each touch my head before they go to sleep. My mother sweeps my hair behind my ear and tells me not to pull. She gets a little teary-eyed and says she loves me, she loves to see me sitting there, she loves having me home.

I think of her love for me and how she says you can’t know how a parent loves a child until you are a parent. I think how maybe all the love in my life is the purple popsicle, and her love for her children is the grape.