Limerence Cellars and The L’Impatient Grape

On the valley's southern side, a winery and vineyard sits on a hill facing north. The estate was intended to exist as a future family heirloom. The patriarch, Grant Mosel, broke upon the southern ground before the industry had taken off in the small town. Mosel's persistent vision afforded him a party of wealthy investors who, upon measuring the risk against his talent, found the endeavor worthy of backing and outlay. Mosel found the ground favorable to his varietals and style of winemaking. He took a wife, who birthed him two daughters, Ries and Chian. The older of the two, Ries, wore yellow-gold hair with straw green eyes; her disposition as she aged was floral and sweet; she was balanced in temperament, acerbic and subtly mordacious. Her father witnessed her nature at a young age and aspired for her succession one day once his hands were too calloused and frail to continue. He educated her early on, showing her everything from planting to cultivation, harvesting to bottling. Ries knew more of winemaking before she was old enough to imbibe than most would come to know in a lifetime. She was undoubtedly her father's daughter, the apple or grape of his eye.

Chian, his secondborn, was less than sympathetic to the process, and her resistance to it, while frustrating to her father, was a sign of her more natural inclinations. He affectionally nicknamed her L'Impatient. She wore ruby red hair and eyes of the deepest blue. While drier than her sister to the complexities of wine production, she was still somewhat earthy, spending her time in nature while longing to see the world. Chian knew there was a world outside her small town and yearned to see as much of it as possible. She was assertive in her proclamations and often challenging to work with. She preferred the solitude of the heat on hills and parched air; camping for days on end, she took longer to age than her sister.

Through the years, the two sisters found solace in their differences. One would never assume them sisters based on their varying features and personalities. Attached from an early age, they were Irish twins. Ries was born in late September, while her sister was born in mid-October; they were just a year apart. Chian followed her sister in her early years but naturally separated as the years passed. They remained close even with their differing interests and proclivities. Their father would never admit it, but there was a tacit understanding that Ries was the preferred offspring and Chian was somewhat of a black sheep.

When the time came for the sisters to either stick around or go off to school in the West, you can imagine how that played out. Ries stayed in the vineyard, helping with the production and management of the family's tasting room. She developed her business acumen along with her own unique winemaking technique. She represented Limerence at all the conferences and festivals—a pretty face for tourists and dedicated to the art of viticulture. There was nothing her father was proud of more, not even the estate but most of his daughter, Ries. In the West, Chian explored the cities and nature alike, discovering all there is to be discovered in a world in which she never quite felt at home. Often, in her excursions, camping in rainforests and high deserts, she would watch the wildlife and think she would much prefer to run away with them, living among the elk herds and skulks of foxes.

The older Chian grew, the greater her distance from home became. On an afternoon in late spring, she found herself in Greenwich Village sharing a cup of coffee with an artist from Paris. In the city, Chian felt right at home. She considered the bustle to be at the speed of her heart and the pace of her head. She and the artist spent afternoons naked in his loft apartment. He would draw her form as she served a function to his creation. Watching raindrops compile on the windowsill outside, Chian would describe where she was born, between sips of afternoon wine, diving into great detail concerning the hills and mountains, Limerence, and the great oak trees lining the city streets. As their connection strengthened, the artist declared her his muse; after all, he was amassing works to which she was always central and subject. He seldom wanted to spend a moment away from her. She was his great light and inspiration for all his formations.

The more he cogitated her existence and desired to marry her, the farther away she grew from him. She no longer wished to be his motivation; she no longer found pleasure in Mousa; she longed for Europe and became bored with the artist. From this glaring realization, the artist nosedived, his work becoming dark or non-existent. Chian no longer spent afternoons in his loft, visiting him only after dark, in the thickness and camouflage of night. Chian had no reason other than boredom and cooling of her heart. The artist confounded, escalated his attempts to capture her heart like in the days of old. As his desires began to burn brighter and hotter, Chian slipped out of the city without any declaration or farewell. She simply did not love the artist. She would return home again, albeit for a shorter-than-average stay. She was to follow her wild pursuits over the Atlantic in search of something else that had been with her since she was a child in the vineyard.

In Spain, Chian took no great interest in wine other than consuming it. On the southeastern coast, near Malaga, Chian took on another lover who cherished her greatly. His admiration was like that of a wellspring, and Chian grew uncomfortable. Was her hesitation due to a feeling of constriction? Did she so greatly desire freedom that another heart's love was more akin to a jail cell than it was emancipation from a life incomplete? Was the burden of absence no burden at all? For Chian, feelings were always complicated, but she held a consistent faith that when she found it, she would know, it being love for another, enough to temper her sporadic soul, space carved in the confines of her beating heart large enough to house another, she need only be ready.

She knew her time in Spain would end soon and, in a rather careless act, led her latest lover on, proclaiming her love to placate his. They spoke of futures, plans to meet at the station, and heading for the airport. A new life together, in another part of Europe or wherever they were inclined to wander. He faithfully passed through the threshold of doorframes, eyes wide, her favorite flowers in hand. He paced the entryway, looking attentively to his watch, granting her more time than was appropriate to excuse her tardiness. Unknown to him, Chian parted for home on an airplane hours prior and was closer to Limerence than she was to him. He sat on the bench with spent flowers and a spent heart. Looking down, he knew she was gone for good, his heart insufficient to tame the ferality of hers.

Chian would return home, and the sisters would reconvene, catching each other up on the trappings of their lives lived separately. Ries would inform Chian of Limerence's progress and advancements in the industry. Chian would describe in detail all the sights and sounds of places far away that Ries had no interest in visiting. For Ries, wine was her life; the vineyard and grape vines would be all she would ever need to feel fulfilled, but she still envied her sister slightly. Truthfully, Chian envied her sister as well but would never express it. Neither of them wished to portray themselves as lacking in any area. They were like two halves of the same whole, opposite but complementary to the other in what they possessed and lacked.

Chian again chartered a path beyond the mountains that confined her, following the threads that pulled her in different directions, drifting toward where her heart called out. Limerence and her hometown were ever-present; she always knew she would have them, which allowed her wandering justification. Over time, made of exploration, she experienced the greatest of a heart's creation and its subsequent break—a love made in New York's spring and the fall in a Spanish summer. On the coast of a Moroccan winter, she discovered a thriving affinity. Textiles captured her soul and gave her itinerancy purpose. Chian found the thing she had been searching for in the aimlessness of the world with all its twists and turns.

Along with this newfound passion Chian found a heart in another that she allowed to plant flowers inside of hers. Chian met Aamir in a textile market in Casablanca, and the two felt like lost lovers in a time long past. With the windows open in his apartment, the two welcomed waves of pollen and wisps of air carrying the scent of something new. Was it finally her time to slow down and allow love to proliferate? Was her search for the unknown and unnamed finally meeting a conclusion fit for film or great romance novel? With nothing but time to explore the recesses of the other's mind, the two were met with defenselessness, a playful love, and a tussle of souls underneath the opulence of a Moroccan moon. They shared in eloquent elocution. Rapturous was the sound of their speech in a whisper. They were the others' appurtenance, trading their soft osculation back and forth, twisting in the twilight and gloam. Chian would lay in his bed and wait for him to return each afternoon, carrying with him something inherent, the something she loved so dearly that without it was like a day spent in dark, like a day inside a cave. Chian would go with him anywhere he desired. She could feel herself surrendering to the thing she spent so long evading and resisting. Like stepping into light, she felt the warmth on her skin as she finally thought she found home; she had finally found it.

Within two days time Aamir was nowhere to be found or seen. Chian was wandering the market where they met, looking high and low, distraught to think he had deserted her. After weeks of his noticeable absence and days spent in grief, she returned to the only place she knew, to Limerence and Ries. In obvious disarray, Ries nursed the wounded fawn back to life on the steady hills, on the consistent dirt that settled in the fields of their lives.

In their father's study, Chian confided in her father for the first time in what felt like a lifetime.

You were such an impatient child. I used to pray and hope that throughout all your travels, you would find patience one day. My L’Impatient Grape. You will recover from this, Chian; I hope you stay around here, not just for yourself but for Ries as well. She needs you as much as you need her, but I think you know that.

Chian couldn't help but think that this heartbreak was payback for those she had so carelessly broken in the past, a karmic comeuppance for the time she left a heart stranded at the station, for the unannounced departure from the city. She was paying something that felt like a debt too high to reimburse. She was underwater in her mourning, underwater in her heart's wrenching.

Over time, she was recovering from the calamity and break. Chian rediscovered that affinity she had found in Morocco, and the craft of textile manufacturing ameliorated Aamir's desertion. She reconnected to the thing that captured her. Chian began to reconstruct, placing the warp over the weft, and after some time, her life became whole again. Staying close to home and with her sister, they perfected their passions. Chian in textiles and Ries in enology, the sisters found in the other a similar passion in a similar color.

As time passed and their father aged, the time came for Ries to either assume the operation of Limerence or be granted it by his passing. The two sisters would always share half of the estate, but each knew of its true ownership. With their father ailing, the concatenation of Limerence was exacted, and Ries assumed full responsibility. Chian was proud of her sister as her solitary dream was realized in an afternoon and the scrawl of a fountain pen. A change of guard was a refresher for her life, and this new stage was welcomed with excitement. With a sprawling repertoire of experiences, she felt the time had come to stay home, commit to her roots, and discover where her vines may grow.

The two sisters came together again, beating upon the dirt from which they came—exploring the vast hills and landscape together again, plotting expansion, watching the sun rise and fall across the valley, feeling whole again after all that time apart. The soft breezes pushed their stocks to new heights, their unification creating a particular atmosphere from which underneath came the fruits of passion and a greater understanding of their surroundings. Fine on their own they were better together like the sun's incipience of a new day. Everything they learned apart was dandy accouterment to the other. Chian opened her own business back home and aptly dubbed it L'Impatient Manufacturing. Limerence shared and displayed her works in the tasting room and vinery. Increasingly, the success of Limerence and L'impatient grew congruently, and with it came profiles and publicity that earned them esteem around the valley and the broader region. All was grand in the sister's kingdom; all was grand in the lives of the Mosel sisters.

Ries, this storm looks pretty bad. I don't think the mountains will save us. The winds are supposed to come from the south and slam into the fields.

The cellar hand had kept a close eye on the storm and dreaded the forecasted path.

We ought to batten down what we can and hope for the best. The hail nets might protect from above. The trees your father planted all those years ago will come in handy at the height of the gusts and gales, and the bird netting can't hurt either.

Ries kneeled in the dirt that raised her, letting little grains of the mire slide through her fingers amidst the downed vines in disarray, uprooted and broken at their base. She cried tears the size of raindrops as she cursed the sky for forsaking her. She had spent her entire life in those hills and had never seen a storm like this. The roofs of her neighbors' homes lay flat and spread across the numerous acres in the area. The blood of the grapes flayed across the mounds of dirt from which she grew. Chian approached, put her hand on her sister's shoulder, and surveyed the destruction. The storm was not quite finished as the sky hung heavy, lit in a darker gray than she had seen in all her travels. With windows blown from their casements and barrels overturned she could only set there with her sister and feel her pain. She wished to take some of it from her sister, eating her passionate pleas for relief and reprieve, but like empathy, she knew a path did not exist. What if all the textiles were blown away from the world? What if all the weaving in the world was over, and all that remained was frayed edges and charred fibers? (Include warp and weft)

All there was left to do was rebuild what their father had left them. Chian made the promise to herself and to her sister that she would never leave to wander again; she had found a home. Her persistent desire to roam and run was suddenly at rest in her soul. She would become a solid force that her father once was to her sister. Ries was in hell; Chian knew hell was hopelessness; she had felt it herself in her travels and her independent spirit she would lend and give away to her sister to share the weight that now hung above them both. Chian would pull her sister from the depths even if it meant descending there herself. She knew the restlessness she felt in her life resulted from a persistent loneliness that permeated throughout her being the longer she stayed solitary and alone. To save herself, she knew she had to save her sister. After all, they were two halves of the same whole, her incompletion borne from resistance. Her life was spent in a steady upheaval; however, disguised and masked in her wanderlust was a fear of never finding home, and after all her time spent searching for it, home was always in front of her; she had just overlooked it all. Ries was her home; she always was. Now armed with knowledge and acknowledgment, she noticed the destruction all around her, but it was nonetheless home, the place where she had always been meant to be.

Sometimes, people must turn over every stone to discover that what they were searching for was the search itself—turning the dry side of the stone to the bottom and the bottom side up. There comes a time in every soul's search that the realization of home is where you're wanted, where you are needed. It is just so easy to ignore love if it is not in the design or form you wish it to take. It's not something so base as ungratefulness but rather a sort of vision deprivation, a crude amblyopia, or lazy eye.