Signs of Life

The Writer's E-Zine Home

Writers' Village University - F2K: Free Fiction Writing Course - ePress-online
Writers' Village University Membership Information

Signs of Life

Nancy L. Horner

Boom, Bang and Bloop

"I need you to squash my muscadines for me," my husband said. I was in the midst of folding an immense pile of laundry. "You know, with bare feet like they do in the movies."

I looked over my shoulder. "In what? That big soap bucket you've got 'em in?"

"Yep."

"No way. Squash your own darned grapes." I continued folding, ignoring the goofy grin on his face.

"Oh, come on. It'll be just like they do it in Italy."

"This isn't Italy and I'm not stepping on anything squishy in my bare feet. Especially in some little bucket."

Fortunately, David gave up at that point. He was about to begin work on his first attempt at making muscadine wine, apparently a fine Southern tradition, since the muscadine is a type of fruit that grows well in the Deep South. He disappeared; and, because he didn't return with sticky feet, I assumed he was planning to put off the great squishing event until another day.

The next day, he returned from work with a recipe scrawled on a scrap of paper. "I got a good recipe from Billy," he told me. "And some samples. Boy, Billy's proud of his wine. Want a taste?" David produced two nacho cheese sauce jars full of a deep red liquid.

"Are you serious?"

"Yeah. It's good––a little stout, maybe, but good stuff. The 1999 vintage is in peanut-butter jars."

This muscadine business was starting to really get interesting. He unscrewed one of the jars; I sniffed it and coughed. "That one's a little stronger than the other," he told me.

"You know Phyllis? In the house up the hill?" David pointed out the window. "Her husband makes muscadine wine, too. Phyllis said one year he made all his wine and lined the bottles up out in the shed. He chose to use nice glass wine bottles and corks––something he'd never done. One day, he said to Phyllis, 'You know, I think I may have corked that wine up too soon. I probably should have let it finish fermenting so there wasn't any more pressure to build up.' About that time, he and Phyllis heard a tremendous 'boom' from the vicinity of the shed. They opened the door of the shed to find glass shards and sticky liquid everywhere."

By this time, I was having giggle fits. David continued the story.

"Phyllis looked at her husband and said, 'Honey, you didn't give any of that wine away, did you?' He said he had given some to one of the neighbors. 'You need to hurry up and call him,' Phyllis said. 'What if he's got it in the house and it explodes?' So he called the neighbor. No answer. Just to make certain, he went down to the neighbor's house and found him out mowing the lawn. Together, they took the bottles outdoors, set them at the bottom of the driveway and backed up. Just as they got to the top of the driveway, both bottles exploded."

"So," David finished. "I've gotta be careful. Ours will stay in the garage."

"Well, thank you for that," I said.

"At worst, we'll just get a couple of really sticky cats."

Later on that night, David brought in the equipment he had once used for beer-making and then loaned to a friend for a couple of years. I really hoped his friend would keep the entire kit forever. Oh, well.

Banging noises started up in the kitchen shortly after he located all the necessary ingredients. I deliberately made myself scarce for the rest of the evening. The next day, I padded out to the kitchen and discovered what appeared to be every mixing dish and implement we owned, all piled up in the sink and on the counter, the whole lot of them coated with dried-out purple blobs. Yuck. I spent the entire morning and much of the afternoon soaking, scrubbing off muscadine remnants, running everything through the dishwasher, drying and putting them all away.

"In the future," I told David that evening, "please rinse the muscadine remnants off the dishes before they harden."

"Oops, sorry." He gave me his contrite look. "Have you seen my wine, yet? It's bubbling, already."

"No."

"You've gotta see this."

David dragged me out to the garage, where his wine sat fermenting in a large container with a clear tube that rose out of the top, looped around a couple times, and then went back down into another hole in the lid of the container. "Bloop," it went. A little bubble of liquid zipped through the tube. "Bloop."

"That's so cute! I love the bloop sound." I stood watching the little bubbles burp their way through the tube. David grinned proudly up from his place beside the bubbling mixture.

"Six more weeks," he informed me, "till the wine is ready to bottle."

Great, I thought as I stood listening to the funny blooping noise. That'll give me plenty of time to empty a few nacho cheese sauce jars.