The Purple

So it has been a while since there were any posts on this blog. Mainly I've been watching economic events unfold much as foretold without the least bit of satisfaction. Nothing much to report. The world has always had people who lived outside of Babylon and I've often wondered to what extent the comings and goings of the chaos of Babylon affected them. I've read David Hansen's The Other Greeks which views ancient Greek civilization from the view point of its homesteads rather than the politics of its city states. Someone living on a remote estate many leagues from Athens or Thebes ... how much did all the political goings on affect them after all?

When we took up permanent residence on this particular piece of ground some eighteen years ago, there was no internet, there was no WalMart (in our town), an hour's minimum wage bought four gallons of gas, and so you'd imagine that life would be very different here now than it was then. It's not.

A couple of days ago I bottled some wine that had been aging in the three liter bottles that served as carboys for the project. The vintage is of some Concord or Fredonia or some such grapes and can only be described as purple. One of the funniest lines I ever heard delivered on a sitcom was years ago when I still occasionally caught such things. Well, not so much the line as the way it was delivered and contributed to the story. The program as Frasier and when he and his croonies had been thrown out of the coffee shop, they went to a piano bar. David Hyde Pierce (Niles) , a consumate commedian, sits at the bar and picks up the wine list and says, "This might not be so bad, let's see what's on the wine list. I will have ......" Here he drops the list with a resigned look on his face "..... the white."

So this product of the backwoods vinter's art is affectionately called "the Purple."

Some of it at least will end up on the storage shelves in the basement and find its way behind the quarts of green beans and jars of jam. It will be forgotten. Then one day years from now, maybe even many years from now, we will be shifting his or that and take up the the bottle as a curiostiy with it's masking tape label from 2009, so many years ago.

Over the glass of wine we will reflect on all that has happened since that bottle was put away down there. We might talk about how that was the time before the health care reform, or the time just before the other economic shoe fell and wiped away the remnant of the ghost-like economy. We might be telling the next generation how before they were born people still got about by means of personal cars still powered by fossil fuel IC engines. Or we might have more interesting things to talk about.

At any rate, here outside of Babylon, will it have made much difference? No, not likely.