Beamsville, Ontario
Wendy BooydeGraff
Even on the frostiest mornings, the air carried the musty smell of grapes fermenting. This was before the ridge in the escarpment was named The Bench, home of artisanal estate wineries. Before The Bench, there was just plain Beamsville, Rural Route #2 spread over gravel roads and pressed stone highways, overlooking Vineland, nested into the curve between the lake and escarpment, a valley of sorts. Beyond the cold gray waves of Lake Ontario, Toronto spiked metal blips onto the horizon. It’s hard not to let the bucolic erase the roughness in my memory. My parents’ fingers were dry and cracked, calloused, nails permanently stained with the skins of peaches, plums, and concord grapes. Gray hair sprouting early. Bills forming crow’s feet and forehead furrows. Faith that required two services on Sundays, midweek catechism, consistory, ladies’ guild, Calvinettes, and Christian school we couldn’t afford. The church kept our minds busy, and the farm kept everything else.
Meditation doesn’t work for me to this day unless I’m also doing the dishes, walking to a predetermined place, or fighting for sleep. I apply my parents’ immigrant work ethic to my writing, but there’s a fracture between the tangible and the ersatz. At the end of a hot summer day, we’d count the baskets of cherries and store them in the walk-in cooler on plywood scaffolds. We’d truck them to the market on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. We’d sell baskets to people with red wagons, people who wanted fruit to can, people who’d eat the skins without washing them, people who’d bake pies, people who wanted green pears in glass bowls on wood tables.
At the end of my morning pages, I have words no one eats or bakes into pastries. I can congratulate myself for a word count goal, but I believe Truman Capote who said that’s not writing; that’s typing. When I go back to Beamsville, I go to the wineries. I lean against the high-top tables in Angel’s Gate, Fielding, or Hidden Bench. Terroir overwhelms me. I thought it was a made-up term, having never been to France, but here, on the land that made me, I taste it all: the wet boots on the yellow bus, the dog breath in my face, the sun melting fruit on the trees, the smoky fireworks the neighbors lit on Canada Day, the sweat of hard work, the peacefulness of night.
Wendy BooydeGraaff’s short fiction, poetry, and essays have been included in Ninth Letter online, Stanchion, Slag Glass City, Phoebe, and elsewhere. She is the author of Salad Pie (Chicago Review Press/Ripple Grove Press), a children’s picture book. Read more of her work at wendybooydegraaff.com.