One of the first, and favorite, things I ever wrote about food was a poem about picking grape leaves. There is, it seems, poetry to be found in the memory of being a child following the ladies out to the edge of a parking lot somewhere to pick what felt like illicit leaves to be stuffed for our big pots of grape leaf rolls (also known as the Greek version, dolma or dolmades). Every spring, when the vines have unfurled their leaves at that perfect moment between tender and strong, I imagine the mass exodus of Lebanese coming out of their homes across the wide world and scurrying out to their secret vines to pick the leaves by the hundreds. It’s our pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, our holy grail, our heart’s content. Our grape leaf.
