The Fox and the Grapes

Fox and grapes

What Aesop did not say – fallen grapes are quite tasty.

The back story:

When Clayton designed our house, he wanted a lot of light, which of course meant a lot of window space.  At the same time, he didn’t want to waste energy cooling a house that was being heated by the summer sun.

Having an engineering type of mind, Clayton measured the angle of the sun in the summer, and decided to plant grapes which could be trained up a pergola which would be constructed on the south and west sides of large plate glass windows.  This way, the fully grown summer grape leaves would provide shade from the top of (and spilling over the edge of) the pergola.  In winter, the grapes leaves have died back and the sun pleasantly warms the room.

What Clayton didn’t anticipate was all the animals which would appreciate the sweet grapes: birds, especially catbirds, raccoons and possums (which have climbed up the grapevines, sometimes with their babies in tow) and now, apparently, teenage foxes.