Not that this is in any way important or even interesting to anyone other than me, I still feel the need to say it once a year: I don’t eat a lot of fruit out of season.
And being from the heart of all things grapey that is Niagara I’m not even allowed to eat grapes outside of late summer/early Fall.
Certainly not grapes from ‘away’.
Except for once a year.
Beginning sometime in February and through March, I hire teams to continuously peel individual Chilean grapes for me as I sit on a tuffet and remember our trip to Chile and Argentina during the earthquake.
Remember also the street dogs of Santiago, the view from our window, Pablo Neruda’s shabby chic home, melons in a truck, the outdoor market, Los Elefantes in moonlight, the Andes, the bread sellers at highway toll boths, the betterthanpesto-like dip [whose ingredients I’ve forgotten], bottles of Carmenere on warm evenings and vineyards… and one stunningly beautiful train station where a man named Mauricio talked of Puerto Montt and the Lake District in such a way that we decided we would have to make the journey back to Chile one day, just to take that train.
That’s it.
That’s everything I wanted to say.
Happy [Chilean] ‘table grape’ season to one and all.
BTW, when fruit falls in a table grape forest and there’s no one there to hear…
does it make a sound?
Matilda Magtree 
Since I didn’t read your post on Chile (which I always spell Chili) when you first wrote it, I was happy to read it now. Lucky you were to get away as quickly as you did, or the experience and your memories might have led to an annual scavenging bottles of water post.
Ha! I think that might very well have been true. We were lucky to get such good advice [to leave quickly] and to have such incredible help doing so. The chap who took us to the airport could have just dropped us at the door but he insisted on coming inside with us then went behind the ticket counter and spoke to somebody to get us on the next plane. Felt like he called in a favour. How do you thank someone for that? I just hope he feels the good energy we send every time we remember him.