Grapes

I recently bought a bag of organic concord grapes. The bag is paper, with a handle, and sometimes I carry around whatever grapes I have left in it. These are very sweet and delicious grapes, maybe the best I ever bought, but after several days I still have a several bunches left. This is mostly because these grapes take some time to eat. Each one is a labor of love. I bite the grape gently and a sweet grape flavor pops into my mouth. Did you get that about grape flavor? I have tasted grape juice and grape candy and grape soda. I have tasted grape flavor, but despite all the vast grapes I have eaten, I am not so very familiar with the taste of a grape in, well, a grape. All your table grapes and your thompson and your flame and your red globes don't, it turns out, have much flavor. They have their sprightly candy fruit burst, their texture can be enjoyable, their coolness, their juice, but flavor? Flavor, a real flavor, a definable taste, a character, is in this concord grape in a way that dwarfs the puny flavors of all the other table grapes I have known.

But there is work, such work. Don't try and talk while eating these grapes. Your mouth will have far too much to do with these grapes for that. Like I said there is that first soft bite, soft so you don't crush into the two or three or four unenjoyable to chew seeds. Then your mouth begins its elaborate calisthenics. Your molars gently hold the skin while the delicious grape juice trickles down to your throat. The pulpy, almost pleasantly viscous, but still distinctly flavorful, center seed mass gets routed to your tongue, where the tip of it, against the roof of your mouth and the edges of you front teeth, starts to pry it apart. Further squeezing pops the seeds one by one out of the pulp and, with tongue and jaw laboring, you move each seed to be tucked away on the side of your mouth opposite where you stowed the skin. From there you can chew up the edible parts or spit the seeds or do whatever you want. I walk around with the seeds in my mouth, faintly confused about what to do with them.

But this is your grape. Do with it as you will.