Planting a Vineyard #7: From the Notes of a City Slicker

Two days ago, we became the heroes of the following exchange:

her: “Honey, when are you leaving?”
him: “I’ll go when they give me a blowjob”

You’d be ashamed, because I’m talking about Enger’s staff, a five-foot-long steel stick with a hollow center that you forcefully push into the ground, twist like a screw, and then pull, cursing whoever pushed it there—yourself. But seriously, thank you, Enger, whoever you were or still are, because it certainly wouldn’t be appropriate for me to prematurely count you among the dead if you were as healthy as a baby. Yesterday, your invention, despite two severed fingers, proved beneficial.

I know what I’m talking about because a few months ago, I was digging like crazy, half-meter-deep holes just to pour a handful of clay soil into a plastic bag. After twenty such digs, with sweat pouring off me in streams and my hands burning like crazy, I swore to myself that there had to be a better solution. And there was, in the form of our brilliant walking stick, which the kind gentleman from Poznańska Street promised to make me, to order. PS-steel.#atfp_close_translate_span#

Why order when you can rent one from the District Chemical Station? The devil, as always, is in the details: the rented one only samples twenty centimeters of soil, while we, in the unique world of wine, need about forty. That’s just how it is, everything backwards. Now I’m running around the field with this new walking stick, my cell phone to my ear, reassuring my wife that I’ll soon be finished with her, I mean, this walking stick.

Meanwhile, the excavator is finishing up the final touches. The overgrown terraces are completely gone; the surface is as smooth as a tablecloth. The depressions are also disappearing. The crew is doing a fantastic job. And so is the weather.

However, I notice something peculiar. Just as earlier on my plot, now on the neighboring plot, a combine harvester is just finishing processing the corn. The dust on the road behind it hasn’t even settled, and already locals appear with sacks to seize what the machine missed. I immediately call them “cornzoneros,” because they remind me of the Argentine “cartoneos,” or cardboard workers. The name comes from a custom in Buenos Aires: you put a box of your no longer needed possessions on the sidewalk, and before you can turn around, without knowing where, enthusiasts for useful things appear. In nature, as they say, nothing is lost, and certainly nothing should be wasted. What surprises me is not even the act of harvesting itself, but how closely the village “observes” and records everything, almost instantaneously, even in a place like ours, seemingly forgotten by the world.