Maita's Grapes

Maita's Grapes

My grandmother Maita had a small vineyard and an orchard on the slopes of the steep hills surrounding her village home where she had and raised eight children. After grandpa died at a young age, she was left at 32 with eight mouths to feed.

They eked a survival living from the orchard and vineyard until one day, the entire slope came crashing down, the fertile terrain with the orchard, vineyard, and her home sliding on top of a thick layer of salt all the way down to the bottom of the ravine.

Luckily her children were grown, they had moved on to their own homes in the village or to the city to make a living in the factories dotting the landscape.

Maita bought a house with a small piece of land and moved to the middle of the village on a more level ground, no more climbing, and close to the only asphalted road where the bus would stop once a day. That home is still standing today, empty and abandoned as her last son passed away three years ago. She no longer had to climb steep inclines to get water in buckets balanced on a heavy stick on her tiny shoulders, to go to church, or to visit her neighbors.

This new home had a few fruit trees and two small grapevines flanking the short walkway from the metal gate to her front door. She made tzuica liquor out of prunes, jams, preserves, and marmalade out of fragrant quinces, apples, pears, and peaches from her orchard, and table wine from the black grapes, nothing fancy.

Her eight children took turns supporting her financial needs the best they could. She was never high maintenance – she ate a lot of beans and soup during lent, and occasionally she cooked an entire chicken outdoors on the spit, in a cast iron pot. Maita made her own bread and canned vegetables for the winter months. She was so healthy that she never took one pill and never set foot in a hospital. We really saw her as invincible and believed that she would live to be 100 just like all of her siblings. But God called her to Heaven when she was 90.

Maita was such a stoic in her simplicity, and seldom complained. Her conversations were brief but her eyes bore through your soul.  I don’t think I ever appreciated the hardships she must’ve gone through to raise her four daughters and four sons and to feed them all on her own. We just took her petite and wiry frame with her piercing sky-blue eyes for granted.

Her simplicity in life and strong determination must have rubbed off on my dad. No matter how dire our financial and living circumstances were, my dad never gave up.  He was as generous as Maita, with a tendency to spend his last dime on family if he saw the need.

I never fully understood the hardships my mom and dad had to endure to help our family survive under the boot of communism until I became a parent myself. Granted that life and parenting in capitalist America was so much easier, still, good parents everywhere must struggle and grapple with dilemmas and choices daily.  

What seems hard and insurmountable in some societies, it is easy in America because people have plenty of food, running water, indoor plumbing, a roof over their heads, and a bed to sleep in peacefully. America has not experienced starvation since the Great Depression when soup kitchens helped many survive.

We take for granted the fact that we can walk into any grocery store and find full shelves every day and all we have to do is check off the list, fill the cart, pay, and take it home.  Some people pay with their hard-earned money, others use government welfare credit cards, paid for by the largesse of other Americans who work and pay taxes. That was not the case under true socialism. If you did not work, your family did not eat.

During flu season in winter, many children got sick in school and had to stay home to recover. We did not have medicines or vitamins, so we had to suffer with high fever for days until such time that we recovered.

Daddy was always afraid that his only child would die, so he always asked me in between my feverish delirium, what I wanted to eat. I could not eat, of course, I had no appetite and mom had precious little in the pantry, but I always dreamed for something extraordinary which I knew, daddy could not find – grapes and cherry compote.

Daddy would kiss my feverish forehead and leave the apartment. He would be gone all day and, by night fall, he would come back with a small bag of withered grapes, almost to the point of raisins, and a small jar of cherry compote. I never questioned how he found these, how much it cost in cash and his time. I could not even eat them, but my eyes lit up momentarily with happiness and that was enough for daddy. He prayed silently that I would survive the bad bout with the flu (gripa).

I was in the grocery store yesterday and even though it is January and winter, I saw an abundance of grapes, white and red, seedless of course, coming from far away Peru. They looked beautiful and unblemished but tasted very sour.

It must be the composition of the soil or the variety of grapes, because they are never tasty like the American grape varieties. Yet it is still an abundance for January, coming all the way from South America and provided by free markets, something we never had under the socialist economy run by the Communist Party. We had to eat whatever it provided us, or we starved.

Maita’s grapes were always a treat in the fall – we knew the green ones were ready to eat when the color turned a light green with golden hues. She would say to me, “the grapes are turning gold with rusty edges, let’s go pick some off the vine.” She taught me how to appreciate other fruits and to be able to tell with precision when a fruit is ripe or not.