Grape trellis

There is a time portal in my back yard. It looks deceptively like an ordinary grape trellis arched over the wooden gate leading to my rose garden. However, it harbors the magic to transport me back through time and space to my grandmother’s grape arbor—the way it was when I was five years old. Grandma’s grape arbor was a mystical green tunnel. It spanned the distance between the bottom steps of her back porch and the gate that led to the vegetable garden. My childhood memory tells me that it went for at least a mile. I know now that it was about 15 feet long. Each year, I watched with awe its transformation from a wire archway lined with brown dead sticks to a green leafy passageway of graceful vines and grasping tendrils. And, when the clusters of tiny green pearls swelled into huge clusters of purple balls, it…