My Own Personal Europe

By Barbara Damrosch

I used to wish that I lived in Europe. Not the real Europe, which is becoming more and more like here every day, but an eternal Europe of cobbled streets, with an open-air market in every village, a butcher and a baker on every block.

It's the Europe where small farms thrive and every yard has a vegetable plot. Whether in France, Italy or Spain, food is taken seriously, and at midday a leisurely, convivial meal is shared at a long table under an arbor dangling with ripe grapes. You need only reach a hand into the dappled sunlight above and pluck a bunch as a finale to your simple feast. Then you take a nap.

I realized that the best way to indulge this fantasy was not to move abroad, but to stay put and nurture whatever aspects of the dream could come true for me without having to leave my friends and family or learn the gender of every noun. Being part of a food community, as a farmer, home gardener and cook, has convinced me that I don't want to be anywhere else. Every neighborhood potluck or swapping of produce, every long afternoon in which homemade stock simmers on the stove, reinforces that satisfying sense of place.

This journey to my own personal Europe felt complete when our grape arbor finally came into its own. It was a project begun six years ago when I laid a cobblestone terrace the length of the south-facing side of the house. Next, a simple but graceful iron arbor went up, designed and built by Mark, a skilled neighbor. The grapevines, planted every eight feet at the base of the arbor's support pillars, took longer. As they ascended, their fruiting branches shot off in all directions, and I removed all but the strongest ones near the top.

Eventually, they all reached the summit and began to fan out over the arbor's roof. I persistently pruned shoots that grew along the increasingly stout trunks, so that all the action would be on top. The growth up there was pruned back each year in late winter, allowing branches to grow along all the crosswise and lengthwise bars of Mark's iron grid. The goal was to make the vines' coverage complete without their becoming an uncontrollable tangle.

The resulting shade now allows dining on the terrace even during the hottest part of the day, when the stones underfoot would otherwise absorb and reflect the sun. Grapes dangle abundantly, some a rusty crimson, others a deep, inky purple, both of them seeded varieties and good for eating.

In addition, Tom, another neighbor, turns most of them into a wine that is, let's say, refreshingly tart, if not refined. "After the third bottle it tastes great," another friend has remarked. One sip and I am, decidedly, not in Bordeaux. But I am home.

Article copyright of Barbara Damrosch. Originally published September 25, 2008 in The Washington Post and reprinted with permission. Creative Commons photo credit: Robert Crum