Today is May 27th and on this day in history… well, someone decided grapes deserved their own holiday. National Grape Day.
We’re talking about a fruit that’s been around longer than most civilizations, clustering on vines while empires rose and crumbled. The ancient Egyptians were making wine when the pyramids were new construction. Roman soldiers carried raisins in their packs as they marched across continents. And here we are, thousands of years later, dedicating a Tuesday in May to acknowledging what’s been quietly sustaining us all along.
Walk through any grocery store and you’ll find them – purple, green, red – sitting modestly next to the flashier tropical fruits. Kids grab them by the handful from lunch boxes. Adults pair them with cheese at dinner parties, trying to look sophisticated. But grapes don’t need our approval. They’ve been doing their thing, converting sunlight into sugar, long before we figured out how to ferment them into something that makes us philosophical.
The vine doesn’t hurry. It doesn’t announce itself with spectacular blooms like cherry trees or demand attention like towering oaks. It simply climbs, wraps itself around whatever support it finds, and produces fruit that can be eaten fresh, dried for the winter, or transformed into wine that improves with age. Patient work that pays off seasons later.
Maybe that’s what draws us to celebrate the mundane – this recognition that the ordinary things are actually holding everything together. The grape harvest has marked time for farmers across continents for millennia. It’s connected monasteries preserving knowledge through dark ages, fueled explorers crossing oceans, and sat on tables where families gathered to share the day’s stories.
In our rush toward the dramatic and newsworthy, we sometimes miss the steady presence of things that just keep showing up. The friend who calls every Sunday. The neighbor who waves from their porch. The grape vine that produces fruit year after year, asking nothing more than sun, rain, and something to climb.
Today, somewhere, someone is picking grapes in morning light, their hands already stained purple. The same motion their ancestors made, the same weight in their palm. The vine doesn’t know it’s National Grape Day, doesn’t need the recognition. It’s too busy being exactly what it’s always been – reliable, generous, connected to something larger than itself.
The small things endure. Maybe that’s worth a Tuesday in May.
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