Grapes

Grapes and I go way back. I was there when Bacchus had his wild drunken orgies, grape leaves round his head. I was there when Steinbeck wrote his Grapes of Wrath peering across his shoulder saying, Way to go, Johnny, way to go, don't stop.

But best of all, I consume them. Can you see me tossing a purple one up in the air and catching it in my mouth, an old trick I used to do for my kids and company. Purple grapes, globe seeded grapes, concord grapes w/their gelatinous filling like pie, and sweet yellow grapes.

So it was I went to my second art class thother night at Abington High School. You'd think a girl like me would be prepared, wouldn't you. But I hadn't had time to think during the week so I came in not knowing what to paint.

There on the teacher's desk was a bunch of brown grapes, just like at home. Bill, I said to the fellow next to me, these grapes look good enuf to eat, but don't try it. They're fake!

That's what I chose to paint for my first in-class painting.

First we took our canvas - I borrowed a piece of thick canvas from the teacher cuz I came unprepared tho have only today purchased mine own pad of special paper - and we painted the background.

Now you'd think this would be easy. I'll tell you right away, it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. The teacher, Chris, would come over and say, Ruth you've got all these white spaces all over the page. Cover them up!

You don't even see em when you're painting it yourself. The object was to simply paint the background on which to paint your objects.

"This is like kindergarten," I said to Bill, my neighbor who has the misfortune of hearing my heavy sighs of frustration as I lather on the paint.

It is so much fun!

Finally, finally I got my green background done. Green - a mixture of veridian blue and yellow (I think) with a touch of red.

Now it's time for the grapes. First, the stems. Dyou know I never noticed what a stem looking like until I began to paint one. They are complicated. They are beautiful. I painted a page full of stems. Chris liked it. "Fill up the page," he said, so I painted stems across the whole page. It looked gorgeous! Wiggly lines like curved railroad trax.

Please, I said to myself, please, Ruthie, do not blow it when you paint on the grapes.

Chris told me to make em huge, like eggs. So I did. I didn't blow it. That was my sole motivator. Don't ruin the damn thing. Improve it. Fill the page. That's called composition.

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Finished my newspaper story about Poets and Poetry at the Elkins Park Library and mailed it into the editor. He said Make it no more than 800 words, the reader gets bored after that. My story was 667 words. I wasn't bored.

Now I get to relax. I'm eating some popcorn sprinkled w/nutritional yeast.

My driveway and lawn are snowless and await with me the arrival of the snow.