Soundbytes 1.29.26

Grapes Today

FAMILY STORIES CAN BE SLIPPERY, passed down the line and goosed in friendly fashion along the way by every teller.

As the story goes (that is, as it reached me) my grandmother Mabel Kline sailed via steamer to the U.S. in the late 19th century from the disputed territory of Alsace-Lorraine. According to my old man, who should have known, Mabel spoke German as a girl and slipped straight into redneck, skipping over correct English. Beyond that, the story goes aground. Possibly in a little town north of Cincinnati, she met and married a terse young lumber yard laborer who didn’t mind her lack of conversational skills. In fact, although I once lived under her reign in the little shotgun house on Wyoming Street, I can’t remember her having much to say for herself apart from occasionally chasing my grandfather and his stinky corncob pipe out of the house. I can still see her there in her dumpy house dress and tight blue curls, scowling and pointing out the back door while my grandfather slunk outside. Git.

Maybe it was Mabel’s taciturnity that gave the Alsace-Lorraine story wheels. If anyone ever had the temerity to repeat the story to her face, she never to my knowledge bothered to correct it. She was stern and buttoned-up right to the chin and not particularly given to pointless conversation. When I lived there, I stayed out from underfoot and mainly watched her go about her business cranking wet laundry through the mangle, striking wooden matches to light the gas stove, scrubbing pots in the pump-fed sink, ironing my grandfather’s identical pairs of khakis.

And making grape jelly. This part of the story, and the song, is true.

Yes, I do know the broad actual outlines of Mabel’s life, her parents and grandparents and 10 siblings, the towns, the births, the deaths. It’s a life that deserves the respect of accuracy. And maybe one day I’ll tell it.

But for me, now, it’s about the grape jelly.

Grapes Today (click to play)

   Grapes today, tomorrow grape jelly   
   So ripe on the vine, it’s time for jelly   
   Grapes today, tomorrow grape jelly   
   Give us our daily bread and spread it with jelly   

The old woman stirs all day, boiling ‘em down
But the sugar turns hard & sharp, like glass in your mouth
May as well hold your tongue, she’ll never hear
While the old lady stirs the pot, stirs the years

Hamburg by steamer, barely a teen
German to redneck, they’ll say, no English in between
Little round wireless specs and tight yellow curls
Little old woman in an old little girl

Took her sweet time, put three kids on the floor
One for Ladies Apparel, two for the European war
And Buddy just strummed that old round-back mandolin
Smoked his pipe on the porch till she made him come in

Now if ants smell sugar, you'll have your share of ‘em
But a pan of boiling water, that’ll take care of ‘em
By God grapes today, tomorrow grape jelly
Say grace then, amen, and pass the jelly

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Philip Singer’s first chapbook, Natives (Chowder Press, Madison, WI) was followed by See Rock City (Gallimaufry Press, Bethesda, MD), poems first published in North American Review, Poetry Magazine, Swanee Review, Yale Review, Southern Poetry Review and other publications too obscure for even the author to remember. He also co-edited the regrettably short-lived New River Review (Radford, Virginia), with poet Charles L. Hayes, and Poetryfish (Norwich, Vermont), an online journal of poetry and fiction. Sun Tea, a serialized memoir first published here on Substack, appeared in 2022, with a couple of afterwords (Hey, kids, wait up!) in the years since.

Singer lives in Virginia with his wife Briah and their little gray wonder-dog, Maisie.