Shriveled Grapes

Nearly every day on my walks these days, I grab a bunch of the grapes hanging from my neighbor’s fence.

He’s a darling, and I have his permission. They are there in abundance.

They’re so abundant that I was eating the fat ripe ones and tossing the shriveled grapes into the street.

Then tonight, I looked at them, and I realized that they were not shriveled grapes after all, but the juiciest raisins I’d ever eaten. Literally sun dried, never-boxed, organically grown California raisins.

I’m not one to lament “food waste” especially occurring outside. It’s a very human perspective, the idea of food going to “waste.” Someone always eats it, if it’s somewhere to be eaten.

But I have been wasting my own experience, by not wanting to eat shriveled grapes.

I have been squandering the opportunity to eat the juiciest, freshest, most natural raisins imaginable.

Thank goodness I shifted my perspective.