"Turn! Turn! Turn!"

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted; ...."

Several days ago, the reflection of the setting sun on the Alps across the lake was so lovely that I had to try to capture it.  I took a couple shots, but this is the only one even partially comparable to the real thing.  Still, it is a mere shadow of the fleeting and fragile beauty of that moment.

Today, I could see snow on these same mountaintops.  The leaves are beginning to show the first tinges of gradations into fall colors of scarlet, orange and yellow.  Friend I stopped by for morning coffee, bringing lebkuchen from her native Bavaria.  The package was festooned with a lively orange bow into which she had tucked a dried leaf gathered by her three-year-old daughter.  She apologized for the leaf's golden brown color.  "It was bright red when we found it.  But its color has faded."

The leaf's color is a stark reminder that we are phasing into autumn.  When I look out over "my" vineyard, I see how lush the vines are

and how heavily laden they are with their precious purple fruit.  Their days are numbered, I'm afaid.

The vendanges (grape harvest) in this area officially began last week on 20 September for grapes used to make sparkling wines (vins mousseux).  Yesterday inaugurated the traditional vendanges for other types of wine.  The period will last for the next six to eight weeks, with the last grapes picked for use in sweet dessert wines.  I expect to see people in this vineyard any day now, plucking the grapes fom the only home they have ever known, moving smoothly and swiftly, but gently and carefully tossing cut bunches of grapes into the carriers on their backs.

Like the apples, the grapes in this vineyard are harvested by manual labor.  Although these particular grapes are grown in my village, they will travel to the vintner in the next village to be made into wine.  That has not always been the case.  This whole terrain was agricultural land and once belonged to one farming family who made its own wine.  The vineyard itself is much older than I, although individual vines have most certainly been replaced over the years.

These grapevines are protected.  No development can take place in this traditional vineyard area.  Other parts of the former agricultural terrain have been sold for residential development.  Zoning regulations for other types of traditional agricultural lands are more flexible.  But zoning regulations for grapevines are stringent, rendering this vineyard, fortunately for me, practically sacrosanct.  So my life intersects with these vines.  I watch the first buds, the gradual greening of the vines, the pruners as they move through and tie the vines in the early spring, the workers as they attach strings higher for new tendrills to climb towards the sun, the spreading of nets to protect the fruit from birds.  The rhythm has continued like this since the vines first arrived here centuries ago, brought - as were so many other wondrous things - by the early Roman settlers in this area.

Now, with the vines, I wait for the inevitable.  The pickers will come.  The vines will be stripped of their fruit, although some grapes will be left behind to replenish the earth from which they sprang.  Ultimately, even the leaves will go.  The branches that are now so heavily laden will be lopped off to mere stumps.  The stumps will rest during the winter, slumbering until it is time for the warm sun to return and the whole cycle to begin again.