Picking Olives

Picking olives. Ahh. I had fun. It was a great day. We drove up into the hills to what was once an old farm house, now remodeled into a pleasant country home. Janine and her husband come here every year to harvest the olives and amazingly, they get enough olives to have their own fresh olive oil for the whole of the next year.

They take the olives to one of the many to local olive mills where they are pressed. I felt a little like a kid who just realized that the milk in the carton at the grocery store actually comes from a cow. Things like olive oil seem so distant and exotic on the shelf, and now, all of a sudden, here I was putting my hands into the process that would lead to making it. Really. It felt very healthy to do that. Like we all need to remember where the foods we eat actually come from.

The trees were not that tall. These particular trees, my friends said, are probably about sixty years old. I couldn't reach the very top branches, but I could reach the vast majority of the olives. They were very dense on the tree. Janine and I did one tree together, taking all the olives off. It took the two of us, working diligently, probably about three hours, maybe four. Then we moved on to another tree where Hervé had been working with a ladder and the three of us kept at that tree until it was too dark to see.

According to myth, it was Athena, the goddess of wisdom, who gave the olive tree to humanity. Olives are one of the oldest cultivated plants on the planet—one of man's first accomplishments. I just read cultivated plants have been carbon-dated to about 8000 years ago and have been in the South of France that whole time. In fact, several of the world's best olive oils are produced in this region.

The trees flourish in the local, sun-baked soil. Apparently, the trees can grow to be fifty feet high with a spread of thirty feet, which makes the ones we were harvesting small, but small or not, they were absolutely loaded with olives. The olives start out green and then turn to a tan that ripens into a reddish, purplish black. When they're really ready for the press, they've wrinkled a little, which means there's not much water left in them. There are still a lot more olives on the property left to harvest, but we came home with one big barrel and one metal garbage can—full to the top, almost too heavy to move.

In the middle of the day we stopped for a picnic lunch that included Tapenade, a local mainstay made with olives, anchovies and capers that among many other things, is spread on bread. We sat at an outdoor table on the terrace with a meal of a quinoa salad punctuated with bits of chicken and avocado and onion and I don't remember what else. But like everything I've eaten with my friends, it was excellent—as was the wine and cheese and bread. It was lovely. And the view from where we were, up in the hills overlooking the entire area, was fantastic.

At sunset Hervé & Janine sent me around to the far side of the house to watch the Ventoux turn pink. It was amazing, an unbelievably rich glow of pink light glimmering off the mountain's limestone peak, which looks strikingly white in daylight.

I totally enjoyed myself. I found harvesting olives really satisfying and not that hard, the kind of work that I could sustain. I was happy to keep going. I just read that olive pickers, according to local dialect, cajole the fruit off the branch. Well, I don't know. But I did notice that we all felt the life of the tree and the sense that it was happy to have its fruit picked. And we joked about the life purpose of the olives and how they'd be disappointed to be left behind.

It felt so good to spend a day outside in the country air. It felt healthy and wholesome. The kids were chasing each other around, laughing, playing and squabbling the way kids do. And it didn't rain. In fact, the weather was glorious. The sun was out and there was no wind until late in the afternoon when we had just a bit of breeze. It was a warm late November day, kind of perfect. I didn't even need my jacket.

And it was quiet too—that kind of country quiet that happens when you're a long ways from any town out in the countryside. Very nice. I feel so fortunate to have been able to spend time in this way.