Even the musky muscadines
Virginia is the furthest south I’ve ever lived — except for Santa Monica, which I don’t count because I think of California as west more than anything else. So far it hasn’t been that much of a culture shock, but every so often I think "Hey, I really am living in the south." What prompts this thought is, usually, food. Moon Pies, for instance. Or creecy greens. I’d never heard of them before moving here, but now I see them canned in the grocery store all the time; this brand, with a cheerful yellow label with a picture of the plant on it, seems to be the most readily available. I haven’t tried them yet, in large part because I’d rather try cooking them myself and I haven’t been able to find the fresh kind yet.
The other southern-US-specific produce I’ve noticed is the bronze muscadine grape, also known as the scuppernong. Before this summer, I’d only read about them (I hazily recall puzzling references to "scuppernong arbors" in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, which I read when I was thirteen). But on one of my first grocery expeditions, there they were: huge, round, thick-skinned, bronzy-green grapes. The North Carolina Department of Agriculture’s scuppernong factsheet describes how their abundance impressed English explorers in 1584. You can make muscadine wine, though I’m not ambitious enough to try it; a muscadine pie would be more my speed.
The other thing that pleases me about seeing scuppernongs for the first time is that I can now picture the "musky muscadines" that appear in Wallace Stevens’ "The Reader":
All night I sat reading a book,
Sat reading as if in a book
Of sombre pages.It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shrivelled forms
Crouched in the moonlight.No lamp was burning as I read,
A voice was mumbling, "Everything
Falls back to coldness,Even the musky muscadines,
The melons, the vermillion pears
Of the leafless garden."The sombre pages bore no print
Except the trace of burning stars
In the frosty heaven.— Wallace Stevens, "The Reader," in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
People have written before about Stevens’s borrowings from Keats’s odes, e.g. the almost palpable presence of "To Autumn" in the final stanza of "Sunday Morning." It occurs to me that "The Reader" is another poem that explores some of the same autumnal landscape, but from a much chillier and darker viewpoint. I also suspect Stevens’s muscadines to be related in some obscure way to the grapes in Keats’s "Melancholy" ode — the lines about "him whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy’s grape upon his palate fine" — in the way that Stevens’ Tennesseean jar in "Anecdote of the Jar" is a more domestic, New World variation on Keats’s Grecian urn. Note to self: reread Keats, buy muscadines, experiment with bursting them on the palate.
Well, things in the south may be a novelty but that doesn’t make muscadines or greens just all that great. I’d go jelly on the muscadines, too.
That’s rather cool – being able to put solid images to those words.
I think I like the creecy can more than I would like the greens. Very nifty.