i've been seeing cotton candy grapes year-round in most grocery stores these days but they often look sad, soft, bruised instead of the vibrant and plump green color that they are meant to be . could this be because the cotton candy grape demand has significantly increased with tiktok's viral jolly rancher/candied cotton candy grape trend and such demand overrides quality and peak season limitations? there was a time when cotton candy grapes did not genetically exist in our world and a time when they existed but were only available at specialty markets during a very small window of the year.... i know because i was there.

it's august 2014¹, more specifically the one week when the drumline AND the country western dance team at your high school are holding practice sessions a few weeks before classes begin to prepare for the upcoming school year. the wranglers are placed in the freshman center cafeteria and the drumline pit are on the auditorium stage. both rooms are connected, literally right next to each other. my exact details are a little iffy but sometime during the day an electrical fire started in the building. the pit began to leave after the auditorium got a little hazy ². eventually the fire alarm went off and the fire truck showed up and put out the fire. pretty standard, no real damage, and thank you to our service people in red. what happened AFTER the fire changed my life forever...

okay first ash was everywhere . covering the marimbas, equipment, music stands, tables. one table in particular had snackies that the wrangler moms set up for their country bumpkins and while rachel was assessing the destruction she noticed a peculiar ash-covered offering - a bunch of long skinny grapes. she had never seen this before and such a sight was a little disturbing. we looked it up at home and found this website that uncovered the truth about the freakish variety. a refined or at least inquisitive and quirky wrangler mother brought bunches and bunches of Witch Finger grapes to nourish a team of country western dancers only for the fruit to be soiled from a fire. what she doesn't know is that this demonic catastrophe launched rachel into the world of unusual and unique grape varieties.

the same website that identified witch finger grapes also mentioned cotton candy grapes. a strain of grape that has a sweet and candy-like finish. how is this possible?? and where do we find them? after recruiting other friends into this mission and preaching of a fabled candy fruit we were finally making this dream into a reality. cotton candy grapes are a summer fruit and our local fancy grocery store (central market yup) had them available from late july to september... we were in luck. i remember trying them for the first time. have you ever seen the ghibli film Only Yesterday? her family buys a pineapple for the first time and is so hype to try it but the first bite is bland and disappointing, the entire family doesn't know why they made a big deal about the thing in the first place³. this was NOT like that. the hype was warranted and genuinely tasted vanilla sugary. i had no idea produce could have such variety⁴. this is essentially where the story ends. cotton candy grapes became a coveted item to us, because the fruit itself was delicious but the lengths to meet the grape were quite silly.

today, when i see cotton candy grapes it reminds me of how tumultuous yet simple my high school years were. i remember how my friends and i made fun for ourselves and how it distracted me from getting too sad about feeling isolated and angry at the world. i remember how we made big deals about small things because... what else were we supposed to do? the years leading up to my college departure were filled with fantasies about leaving and never looking back. i constantly felt limited and trapped, i was acutely aware of the bigger things out there and none of it felt out of reach. after giving myself distance from my hometown and reevaluating some painful memories i've decided, quite simply, there were ups and there were downs. more ups than downs but the downs were bad. nevertheless i'm grateful that some of my hometown friends are still my friends today. it's really special to maintain connections with people who understand where you came from. i can tell them about how a fire in the freshman center taught me about grape varieties and they'll say "fuck the freshman center."

1. This part is from the view point of my sister, Rachel. We were both in our high school's drumline the year before but this point i was an incoming senior and had just extremely and dramatically quit high school band a few months earlier. I still get vivid dreams about band like... it was so serious at the time and was a breeding ground for some severely intense conflicts in my life. And yet I still cherish my time doing it omg something about playing scales in a group setting using the circle of fourths at 160bpm for hours a day is very sweet to me. It was also hell. Both exist.
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2. Naur the way the drumline didn't tell the wranglers to leave the building...↩

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4. This is definitely due to produce monopolies and agricultural exploitation in the US. I don't know a lot about this topic but I do know that diversity in produce is endangered because corporations look for uniformity and profit maximization. Many people (myself included) are clueless to the sheer variety of plants and vegetation that are struggling to survive.↩