Sweet Tooth
In 2010 Toni and I rebuilt our back yard, and we put four grapevines and a trellis on the west side of the house. The main idea was for the vines to leaf out during the hot months and help keep the house cool, which they do very well. The very beneficial side effect is that they are prolific producers of red seedless table grapes. When they ripen I can eat my fill of them every day for weeks and still have enough to give away.
They’re very small grapes. Most of them are between BBs and peas in size, but what they lack in bigness they make up for in sweetness. They’re HUGELY sweet. And when they turn into raisins, look out! If you catch them before they petrify, they are the sweetest raisins I’ve *ever* had.
Because we didn’t have any winter to speak of this year (the midwest and northeast regions of the nation got everybody’s winter, I think – theirs, ours, California’s…) the grapes came in early. I gave shopping bags full of them to several friends, ate another shopping bag’s worth (at least!) all by myself, and still had two bags of grapes with me when I left on my Expedition. Knowing that Eve likes grapes, I saved one of the bags for her, and shared the other bag with people I visited along the way.
Eve is truly her father’s daughter – she can eat store-bought cake frosting right from the can, or homemade butter cream frosting right out of the bowl. So imagine my surprise when she ate some of the mini-raisins I had brought with me and said they were too sweet for her! Go figure. I didn’t know such a thing as too sweet existed for her. It turns out (as I discovered tonight) that there are several “natural” sweets that are too much for her, like cherries (and now my raisins).
Surprise, surprise, surprise! (as Gomer Pyle would say)
The Peripatetic Traveler 
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