Morning. New moon opposes Saturn. Flower day. Should we be picking?
The malbec seems to have stalled in its ripening. Five successive days and virtually no change despite warm days. Sugar and acid hold steady. Flavor otherworldly, continuing to intensify, but still…
Honeybees hover at the edge of the nets. What does that signal? Why are they here in the earliest of hours? Then a telltale “peep”. Silvereyes! I open the nets and clap my way up and down the rows to move them out. I’m the head monk clapping through sesshin! Intoning “Om mani padme hum” as I move down each and every row, the scrutiny of the net my exercise in mindfulness.
Birds gone, I am a fisherman mending nets once more, finding rips, so many tears since yesterday. The marris have not blossomed. The land is oh so dry. The silvereyes have taken sips out of grapes and the honeybees are drinking the sweet nectar of the riven berries.
The innocent thieves in England, stealing bread to feed their families, were exiled to Australia. The innocent aboriginals pushed off ancestral hunting lands in turn took livestock to feed their families, were punished severely. The silvereyes and kangaroos, sipping and chewing my grapes have been shooed away. Am I too soft?
Birds in the nets signal picking time, do they not? What do they know that my lab tests and inchoate palate do not?