Today when I was pruning our concord grape and bronze scuppernong vines, my mind drifted back about 65 years to when I was growing up on the farm and we were living with my Mama and Papa Wilson in their big farm house. In warm weather, mother would send us outside to play during the day .One of my favorite summer childhood recollections is recalling times spent in our playhouse under our scuppernong vine. All of our friends had “scuppernong playhouses”. It wasn’t an unusual sight to see a large squarish or pointed framed-up scuppernong vine standing a little bit over 'head tall' in everyone's back yard. We made a playhouse under ours. The lovely thick-leafed vines made a perfect shade overhead and the long runners hanging over the frame offered a lot of privacy. Our playhouse had only one door (opening). It was dark inside. Our playhouse even had bench seats you could really sit on. Made with wood blocks or old bricks and old planks - our little tables were old buckets or pans that had holes in the bottoms or the handles torn off. With all of our ideas we'd furnish all the laid-off rooms and then we would make mud pies and “bake” them outside in the hot sun. We made brooms from straw to sweep the dirt floors. We would decorate our cakes (made from mud) with green china berries or little flowers we would pick. Or we would just play with our Sears-Roebuck paper dolls (individual dolls cut from the catalog and furniture made from paper). This occupied our time for hours.
'During the late summer, when the scuppernongs were fully ripe, we'd take our friends to our scuppernong vine for refreshments . Standing inside our playhouse, you could just reach up or out to the side and eat juicy fruit.
There was a major problem in the fall; in the form of winged creatures known as wasps. They liked to build nests in the vines and drink the nectar of the ripe scuppernongs. And when we would reach for the ripe fruit, we would get stung. Papa Wilson chewed tobacco and would apply some spittle to the stung area to “draw out the pain” so he said. Our grandmother lost her sense of smell when she was aging, and once applied Watkins vanilla flavoring to wasp or bee stings on my brother and cousin. She thought she was using linament instead. The bottles looked alike.
I remember how much cooler it was under the scuppernong vine and there were always gentle breezes blowing through the leaves.
No one ever seemed to know to spell scuppernongs, and I think it was because we called them something like "scupplins". I learned the correct spelling when I read "To Kill a Mockingbird" many years later. I wonder when school children read that book, if they have any idea of what a scuppernong arbor is.
Maybe I will go outside and “square up” one of our scuppernong vines to create a playhouse for children to play. Not a bad idea except it would ruin my carefully laid out landscape. I have to maintain my reputation as a “Master Gardener”.
