Read the fable Elena loves
The Fox and the Grapes
A hungry fox, a vine heavy with grapes just out of reach, and one of the oldest tricks anyone has ever played on themselves: one of Aesop’s shortest and most quoted fables, still true after twenty-five centuries.
One hot afternoon, a fox came trotting down a dry hillside path with an empty stomach and nothing to show for a whole morning’s hunting. At the bottom of the slope, in an old vineyard gone half wild, she found a vine climbing high up an olive tree, hung all over with bunches of grapes so dark and full that the sunlight seemed to glow right through their skins.
The fox sat back on her haunches under the tallest, ripest bunch of all, and looked up. The grapes hung just above her, close enough that she could smell their sweetness, and she told herself this would be easy.
The first jump
She crouched low, gathered herself, and sprang, but her jaws closed on nothing more than warm afternoon air, a hand’s width short of the lowest grape. She landed, shook herself off, and tried again at once, jumping a little higher this time, and still came down with nothing.
She backed further away to give herself a running start, then dashed forward and leapt with all four paws off the ground, and for one bright second her nose brushed the very bottom grape and set the whole bunch swinging gently, just out of reach, before she thudded back down onto the dry earth.
Trying again
She rested a moment in the shade, watching the grapes sway back to stillness, and told herself one more try would do it. She tried leaping from the side, and then from a little mound of earth, and then with a running start down the slope itself, but every attempt ended the same way, with the grapes hanging exactly where they had always hung, and the fox on the ground beneath them.
At last she sat back, sides heaving, paws sore from the stony ground, and simply looked up at the grapes for a long moment without trying to jump at all.
Sour grapes
She sniffed once, tossed her head, and decided out loud that the grapes were probably sour anyway, hard and unripe, not really worth a fox’s trouble. She turned and trotted off down the hill with her chin held high, as though she had never wanted them in the first place.
But grapes left hanging that long in the warm afternoon sun, on a vine as healthy as that one, are rarely sour, and behind her, untouched and unspoiled, they went on ripening quietly in the light. It is often easier, it turns out, to decide you never wanted a thing at all than to admit you simply could not reach it.
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Greek Cypriot Lullaby
Play this softly while you read The Fox and the Grapes aloud: a traditional lullaby from Cyprus, from the same Greek-speaking world Aesop’s fables have travelled through for twenty-five centuries.
More stories, more lullabies
This is one tale in a growing collection of traditional stories from around the world, each one paired, where we can, with a real lullaby from the same culture.