#2. Among The Olives

“You should write about the olives while it’s still fresh,” she said.

And I wanted to but I wasn’t quite ready yet.

Instead I regressed, writing about a man, as I have in the past, trying to tell my story through the lens of my relationship to him.

Then I wrote about the past.

I wrote about a new wild fictional character and fell in love with her and the story she wanted to tell.

Still wasn’t ready.

I read about the history of olives and the stories others had to tell. I researched apprenticeships at groves in the States and in Italy. I daydreamed about my future oliveto, walking through it in the pre-dawn light and again each sunset.

"Write about it while it's still fresh."

But how do I describe the peace that comes with pruning and weeding and harvesting olive trees? The pride at dirt under my nails and each level of terrace capped with the sign of hard work —large piles of nettles, wild fennel, and tiny, tiny wannabe trees.

Much like the wildness of my brain, I had to clear some things out before I could tell you how in the silvery shade of the olives my mind finally found a rhythm within which it can breathe.

As I write, I have difficulty imagining how these words could be interesting to anyone else. Their slowness, lack of conflict, sweet beauty without a plotline that rises and falls. I'm writing them for me and if they are maybe one day for you, so be it.

I was sitting on a green and white striped lounge chair on the front porch, staring out at the valley below me. I’d been doing this same thing for over a month now, but the beauty still hadn't gotten old. The tramonto of late autumn had found its way into the hills and spoke loudly through the leaves of the still green oaks.

Lauren had returned to the States and Alex was off adventuring in Morocco, riding camels through the desert. The wind, the trees, and unfortunately large spiders were my only companions. Solitude, pure bliss.

Just as I had sunken fully into the silence, I heard gravel crackling as a car began making its way up the long and twisty driveway. Not quite as alone as I'd thought. Elena. She bounced out of the car armed with pruning shears, gloves, and a smile. And I had to smile back.

"Pruning the olives today," she said after a brief hug and greeting.

I felt something in my heart leap. Caring for olive trees, learning how to care for olive trees has been on my list of obscure desires for a long time. A very long list.

Obscure desires…culturally I’ve heard a woman's desire framed as singularly primal. A partner. A child. A home. We've even evolved (or rather some of us have evolved) to include a career and sex in the list. But we stop it there.

I don’t have any of these things at the moment, but my desire is still desire. Female desire comes in many shades of complexity and has its own, maybe older more ancient, kind of primal.

My mother grew up at and around my great-grandparents' farm in central Illinois.

They grew sweet corn, had strawberry patches, canned green beans and other veggies. They jarred jellies and jams, raised pigs and cows, had a horse or two. Grandpa even let her drive the tractor sometimes when Grandma wasn't looking.

Mom left at sixteen and the life she chose to raise my brother and I in was much the opposite.

I grew up in a shiny new suburb of Chicago where the houses weren't completely cookie cutter but they all were freshly built. This was my mother’s desire…to live in houses no one else had before, where the feeling of the space was clean and all her own. Brand new places, with backyards large enough for a concrete slab to put your "lawn" furniture on and to play mushball and football but not much else.

No one in our neighborhood grew anything you could eat. There were trampolines, a couple of swimming pools and grass but no gardens or fruit trees or even herbs. In fact, most of those ornamental plants along the edges of houses and fences and sidewalks would probably have made you sick if you ate them.

I always knew I didn’t love the suburbs. It felt…surface to me. Fake but not like the people were fake, like the place itself was movie set kind of fake. As if the stories living in the land had dug up from it before the foundations of our homes were laid.

So our neighborhood didn’t have tractors or growing things or any animals (besides the occasional dog and iguana). What we did have nearby was a small village library full of books, most of which I managed to read before leaving home at 17. I was voracious, consuming every story I could find, learning about places and people who were so different from what I knew. I read sci-fi and mysteries and romance and eventually some of those tales led me to explore memoirs from other places.

I was especially fascinated by those featuring the countryside in Italy and France. Something about the pace of that life spoke to me. My own life seemed so complicated, impossible to untangle, I longed to replace its complexity with the simplicity and connection I read about there.

Olive trees and vineyards, community and solitude always seemed to play a large role in lives of these women and their memoirs. They all seemed to have experienced some sort of catalyst that caused them to uproot their established life in the US to build a new one restoring broken down villas and cultivating abandoned groves and vines in the Tuscan or Provencal countryside.

I wanted that, desired, longed for it. A life of my own. It was hard to imagine I could ever have something like it, so I tried adding in the pieces I could.

I became enamored with rosemary, basil, and sage, herbs that scented my hands as I cooked with them. So I tried growing them. Mmmm, not so much luck there. Instead my experience led me to believe the green thumb of my ancestors had skipped my generation.

The plants I tried my hand with died almost upon purchase. Once I killed a basil plant I'd brought home from the market that same afternoon.

I am a serial rosemary killer to this day. I keep buying pots of them only to love them to literal death. When I lived in Ocean Beach, someone gave me a giant rosemary bush that had been dug up. I put it in a large, beautiful bright blue enameled clay pot and named it Della May after my great grandmother.

Within a single week, Della May gave up the ghost, standing an brown and dead.

Pothos were the only forgiving bit of green I seemed to be able to maintain and those only because their language of happy and unhappy was so clear by the stance of their leaves.

I never thought much about farming myself. It didn't seem like an option for me. But my notebooks were full of sketches featuring large gnarly rooted trees that stretched off the page. I would often tell folks that the only thing I could draw were trees but I never understood why that was.

The first time I saw video of the Tuscan countryside I felt a resonance, vibrating within me. Many years later, I found myself driving through it and its sister, Umbria, crying at the sense of home, wholeness, and groundedness I felt there.

The fields of sunflowers lifting their faces to the sun and then later in the season the saddest sight of their bent heads heavy with seeds. Stone walls and cypress trees lined long drives. Rosemary and sage and lavender grew wild. The hills were thick with olives and vines. And magic.

It was the first time I felt a true connection with land. A powerful thing.

A few years later when I found myself moving to a tiny cottage on a small vineyard with olive trees and wild herbs in central coast California wine country, I felt that same movement in my chest. Or almost the same. The beauty moved me, but the connection seemed to be…lacking. An unrequited love between me and the a land that very gently shoved me out.

And so here I was back in the Tuscan hills, faced with the possibility of exploring this longing that had been slowly growing in me since I was a child.

I took a breath and as the words began to form on my lips, I felt timid (an unusual feeling for me). So, very softly, I let them out.

"Would you teach me how, like show me how? Maybe I could help if  you have more tools?" I held my breath and crossed my fingers.

Her already smiley eyes lit up. She seemed surprised, "Are you sure you want to work?" I did. The longing I’d opened the door for was now shoving its way out of my chest followed by a deep exhale as she said, "Okay then! Of course! I'd love that."

She found me a pair of oversized gloves tucked into the dashboard of Paolo’s Piaggio. I put them on, fumbling with leather fingers long enough to fold over an inch or two, and she handed me my tools.  A pair of yellow handled rusted shears and a small similarly rusted saw.

I paused for a moment. Nope, tetanus shot still valid. We're good.

I stared out at the neat rows of messy overgrown trees in terraces built with reclaimed Etruscan stone.

“Andiamo,” she said. Let’s go.

Write about the olives while it’s still fresh.

Nope, not quite ready for that. This is one of those slow love stories. And this here is just a ramble introduction to those ancient silvery olives and their twisted roots on that sticky hot early October day.