Conversion

When the sun is going down, Robert and I walk out the door and down the road for exercise. I feel I am made of blocks that are having difficulty staying stacked on top of each other in a straight line. We pass vineyards. I hadn’t noticed how many vineyards there are until the summer covered their bare branches with leaves. They are propped up with string—no wonder they grow so straight and regular. We pass a tiny cemetery with family names, including the name of our own short road with its warning “Rough Road” at its entrance. We pass a church converted into a family home with big windows along its sides so that you can see all the way through, like looking at the sky through square glasses. Friends live there, and we’ll visit on Sunday. We pass apple trees and corn fields and bean fields. The wheat fields are the most colorful with white Queen Anne’s lace (wild carrots) and purple hairy vetch (someone does not like this flower) showing through the gold. The winter wheat is ripe for harvest, and these are the tares to be cleaned away, bouquets that can’t be eaten.

The vineyards have brought a conversion to the area. It’s not just fruit farms and grain farms now; it’s a wine trail, and where there were just a handful of wineries when I first married here, now there are dozens, their driveways lying right next to each other along these roads, and I watch how they choose their labels, some from family names, some from locations, some from a whim or a to make a statement. One is called Megalomaniac with classy clothes in human shape but no faces.

We take our walk along the escarpment, the cliff over which the Niagara River falls. At the Falls, water thunders abruptly over rock shelves with such power that its seething surge at the bottom holds the ferries at bay with their blue-raincoated passengers drenched in river spray. At night this water power is harvested for conversion to electricity. Here, though, the escarpment drops smoothly, gradually, so that tiny vineyards nestle in crooks of the drop, drinking their flavors from micro-climates caught in mini-plateaus like fumes in wineglasses. Here the water drips from the sky and filters through soil to be sipped calmly by grapes, water converted to wine the quiet way. Some wineries let the grapes freeze in winter to squeeze out ice wine, the sweetest of all. The tourists follow both trails of water, leaving a trail of their own, of water converted to houses and jobs.

When you are driving above the escarpment and come to the edge, most roads curl round and back to take you down more safely, although in winter, black ice can still lie in wait and ambush you. One winter night my friend Alyson found herself hanging upside down, strapped over her car-roof in a ditch on such a road down the escarpment. But on one road named Victoria after a queen, you crest the top and go straight down (watch your speed; the cops are merciless) and as you first catch sight of the bottom, you see the lake stretch out majestically before you, with the silhouette of a great city lying dim in the distance across flat water, with its iconic tower soaring above, and I’m surprised every time, and my heart lifts like it lifts when I drive round a curve and see mountains!

As we walk along the escarpment beside quiet vineyards, I tell Robert of the book I’ve just finished. This one I savored while vineyards greened: The Cloister Walk. It describes how people following the Benedictine Rule commit for life to an ongoing conversion of the heart, a slow, gradual renunciation of power until God has it all. This conversion, this wine-turning, takes a lifetime. It’s not a moment, a raising of hands and going forward. Somehow I think the Benedictines have the better definition.