Monday, January 19, 2009

Kenny V/1

Well I am back in the vines. Sunrise to Sunset. You can do that in the winter and still not have enough hours at the end of the week to make a big check. You know, one that makes you think the pressure is off for a while. That’s why the pay is in cash, liquide is how they say it here. They’re perfect the two words together in my head. The cash folds up in your pocket and the liquide flows right out again. All these small chunks of cash that I harvest in the vines.

It’s work. Clipping clipping clipping. Not unpleasant, at moments. It’s the continuousness of it that is the work. This field is like a football field, picture it in meters, yards, acres, hectares, whichever you can best sum up. The vines are planted in rows, each a meter (or 40 inches if you prefer - ladies which do you prefer) apart. The rows are two meters apart. It only takes two minutes per vine, but there are thousands all lined up and waiting to be shorn of their latest seasons matrix.

If you start doing the math (especially with a clock) it becomes brutal. In the farm world, simple mathematics lead to a sum that is futile, often depressing. |t is better to just look than think. Juggling with idle numbers you might inadvertently snip when you should’ve snapped. Look don’t think. Where will I put next, the blade of my electric shear? There is a year’s worth of the vines work you erase with each squeeze of the trigger. The future is altered, one way or the other. Quickly decide. Quickly decide. Quickly decide. All day long.

There are moments when you stop.

To smoke a cigarette, take on or off clothes, to look around, stretch your mono-positioned back (lean down and into the vine with your left shoulder, with left arm sweep together the serment, right hand position shear at correct height, finger pull trigger, left hand grab shoots and cast behind you). It always feels good to move into other formations, even if for a brief time.

Today the sky was full of clouds that were an assortment of blues that one would normally associate with tropical waters. It was stunning in the sense that I had never seen that before, a sky totally blue with clouds.

1 comment:

  1. Surely this would be meditative work! Start to speak to the vines...talk to them of harvest. How do they feel about giving their fruits to wine???

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