Harvesting olives in the sun
by Azure
It was January, the end of the olive season and we had decided to work an olive cycle – from tree to oil – on a family farm in the hills above Nice. Marguerite, the matriarch, lived in the same room in which she was born 89 years before and worked the same trees that her father and his father had planted. Only she and her daughter still lived on the farm, so they asked for help each year when the olive trees needed tending.
The work was slow and peaceful on the terraced hillside overlooking the valley. We’d climb each tree, harvesting branch by branch with long poles, then trim those branches and remove any remaining olives on the ground. We loaded them from the nets into crates, which we carried by hand then sorted at night in the main room of the family home, talking while we sorted in front of the fire. The best of the olives would be cured for salads, the medium quality would be made into tapenade and the imperfect ones, crushed into oil by the ancient stone that Marguerite’s father had hauled up the valley and installed in what is now the regions only remaining stone mill.
Each day, it was the same routine, tree after tree needed to be tended, but we couldn’t have been happier. We were experiencing what happens every year on family on farms all over the region – we were being shown the pace of the olives.
This post has been entered into the Grantourismo HomeAway Holiday-Rentals travel blogging competition.
Posted 1 year ago. 1 comment
Mike carrying the kiwi branches. He hates kiwi trees now.
by Azure
This is long overdue and it won’t be very coherent, but this is the best recap I can do now…
When I got to the farm, Claude was the first person I saw. She was having a meeting with a guy from the Bio department and he was sort of checking up to make sure that her practices were on track with their standards. She wasn’t expecting me so early and had to put on her glasses to see who it was. When she realized it was me, she greeted me, not warmly, but as warm as she had ever been towards me. She directed me to Margarite’s house and as I was climbing the hill, I ran into Mike.
When we got to the apartment that we had shared the year before and that he was then inhabiting alone, it was a mess! There were dishes all around and he was obviously sleeping on the couch and had a “meditation station” on the floor, which consisted of a pile of blankets in front of the bathroom. The toilet seat was up and he ran around trying to tidy up, not unlike someone would do on a first date. He apologized for the mess and told me it was sort of his bachelor pad. I suppose this is really what Mike would do if he were single, you know, go crazy on honey tea and meditate on the floor a lot. (read more, I could lie and say there are awesome images here, but I won't, it is just a really long post)
That afternoon, I took a nap and he worked for a couple hours before the family went to town to pick up the third sister from the airport. Mike and I used the time to go into town and get a few things. The freedom of being able to just go to town was a huge deal to him. He had to take the bus to Nice a couple times. It only came twice a day and came back once a day. He had taken a different bus to a town down the road and had to hitch hike back.
Since all of the sisters were in town, we ate lunch by ourselves. It was fine, a simple meal, some vegetable soup, corn and beet salad and some bread. It was probably the nicest meal we had the whole time I was there.
My feelings about going back to the olive farm were these, I was neither excited nor dreading it. I didn’t feel that we had left on the best of terms, but they weren’t horrible. I went back because Mike was there and from what I understand, he went back because he had a respect for the place and felt a connection with it because it was the only farm that we had worked on.
Needless to say, I didn’t have the same nostalgia about the place that I did before. I was prepared to do crappy jobs and work alone and not really get a lot of positive interaction with the family, so it was fine when that happened. The first morning Mike went off to do the hard labor that he had requested and I was to make confiture (jam) with Claude. Mike had told her that I wanted to learn how to make jam and I was really excited and sort of shocked that it would happen. I was actually skeptical. And I was right, it was too good to be true. Claude showed me the process. You sit in a room with no heat (there was still snow on the ground outside), by yourself, washing the oranges in water that is barely above freezing level. Then, you cut them open to find no juice, but many seeds and you dig the seeds out. If there are too many seeds, you take the whole inside out and keep the orange rinds. They were the saddest of the sad oranges in the saddest of the sad settings.
I finished the whole bunch right at noon and we were off for lunch. After lunch we went back to work. I never got to see the end of the confiture-making process because I was too busy ramassaying (picking olives off the ground). This wasn’t my very least favorite job, but it isn’t too high on the list. In fact, when I got sick last year and Mike had to pick olives off the ground by himself, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, the reason we ended up leaving so abruptly. It isn’t so horrible of a task if it is sunny and there are people around to talk to, but when you are sent to do it, it is almost degrading. It is monkey work and you feel less important.
That being said, I didn’t let it bother me much. I think coming to the farm with low expectations and the knowledge that I was only working for 2 days made anything bearable. I suspected that I would have these tasks, mainly because I knew how much time it took to earn Claude’s respect and I knew i didn’t have that much time OR the desire to do so this time. I just did my job until the bells rang 5pm, then went on my way. (we would later find out that WWOOFers were only supposed to work 4 hours a day, 5 days a week–we would work 6.5 hours a day, 6 days a week)
Mike was doing something else that afternoon, moving branches around or something and he would pass by and whistle at me. Even that quick exchange made me feel like someone cared about me and it made picking olives not so bad.
At one point, Claude needed me to cut the blackberry bushes back, so that Mike could dig them out. This job required that we work together, something which I believe Claude tried endlessly to avoid. It didn’t slow our work at all, but it did make it MUCH more enjoyable. In fact, we would have been much happier doing all the tasks together and probably would have worked better and faster.
That night we ate dinner with Claude in her place. Despite the fire, it was cold inside as usual. She wasn’t feeling well. When we got to her living room, there were only two comfortable chairs by the fireplace. I pulled over a regular chair from the table, but she said something and went off into the other room. She proceeded to take an electric saw and cut the legs off of a broken chair so that it was at the same height. I sat down. Claude told a story in French that I understood 1/3 of, then she went to bed.
On that night, we thought of the word for Claude–martyr. There is no other way to describe her. The sadness that we felt for the place the year before, I can’t help but think that is how she wants us to feel. The place doesn’t have to be sad at all. It is what it is because of what Claude and Margerite make it.
Mike later told me that Claude had told him that “people idealize this slow way of life, but it is hard, you are constantly fighting against nature.” Her life is a struggle because she makes it a struggle.
The next day was easier. I ramassayed alone in the morning and after lunch. They told me to go find olives on the ground and pick them. Most of the trees had been picked, so I had to hunt for them, but I filled two baskets full. I was a ramassaying machine. I was literally digging them up out of the ground to fill those baskets. This year I wasn’t doing it for Claude and Margerite to succeed, i was doing it so I could succeed at not being sucked down into their misery. At lunch, Claude came to the table with Margerite and Monique (the youngest, prettiest one, who we found out had cancer last summer). Monique seemed nicer this time. She was personable and real, still distant, but I think that’s how she was raised. Claude sat at the table with her head in her hands. She was so sick that she couldn’t even eat, but she still came to the table. It was a scene, people trying to talk without paying attention to the woman bent over in pain at the end of the table. She should have been in bed, but it was in her nature to suffer, and I think, have everyone else know she was suffering.
At 4:30, I took my full basket up to the house. Margerite gave me another quick job of pulling weeds in her garden. I could see Mike now, he was finishing up with pruning the Kiwi trees. It was a hard job and I didn’t envy any of his hard jobs. At 4:55, he came over and watched me work. He was done because it was close enough to 5pm to be done and he reminded me of that.
Mike took this picture when he quit at 4:55 and watched me work for 5 minutes.
Neither of us have jobs like that. We don’t quit at 5pm, we work until we finish or get to a stopping point and it felt incomplete to just walk away.
Before we went down to the apartment, Margerite told us that Claude needed us to work on Saturday. Mike had told Claude that we were going to go to lunch in Italy on Saturday and we needed to leave early. But, she needed us to work in the morning, so we did. Mike dug holes and planted fruit trees, I weeded a garden that I didn’t even know existed. We didn’t make it to Italy in good time. It didn’t matter, though, the place was closed for for repairs and we ended up eating elsewhere, but it was still bitchy. We could have been upset, but we really weren’t. I remember thinking as I was pulling up the lawn of weeds that covered the few puny lettuce leaves that I was just so happy that I was not sad. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it isn’t. I didn’t have to live like Claude and I didn’t have to think like Claude and even though she could keep us there working, when we wanted to be eating delicious Italian food, she couldn’t make us feel as miserable as she felt. It was a win. Wow, this is kind of a mean blog post!
And we did end up eating good Italian food. And the Italian people were nice to us and invited us back for a party! Which is one of the reasons we thought, “Why do we want to move to France instead of Italy?”
Posted 1 year, 10 months ago. 1 comment
by Mike
I don’t pay enough attention to a place’s ‘placeness,’ even though we travel so much, and quieting my monologue was powerful in letting me be present on the olive farm in Coaraze.
Here’s what’s there: Water on long grass that wets your shoes; dozens of bird songs from hundreds of birds; dry folds in the hazy valley; clay; upset chickens that sound like monsters; the echoing olive mill with its slick concrete floor; a shovelful of purple olives; sharp kiwi branch cuttings that sliced my arm; the cold and narrow aluminum ladder; greenish shadows of plants against the greenhouse plastic; scurrying spiders; dirt caking rotten tomatoes; the cold that descends when the sun drops behind the mountain at 4:30; honks that work their way up the valley’s tight corners ahead of the bus; barks from dogs down below calling to dogs farther on; the compounding smells of thousands of meals cooked in Marguerite’s kitchen, what became an average smell of food from this valley over 100 years; Claude’s cold fire; the jars and never-finished dishes in Claude’s cold kitchen; the peace of an olive tree in the sun; the strength of a deep-rooted sticker bush…
To know a place takes a while, and it takes attention, presence.
(one more photo)
Posted 1 year, 10 months ago. 2 comments
by Mike
My job was to prune every grape vine on the farm in Coaraze. Having all this time doing a task I understood pretty well, I decided to try something I called a “working meditation,” an effort at intense awareness while still doing my job.
I discovered that words are the vessels that allow my mind to wander. I kept having to remind myself, “No words,” and I’d be brought back to the vineyard from wherever I’d been thinking about.
These are pictures of grapes that didn’t get harvested last October. They were scattered at the feet of some vines.
(more photos)
Posted 1 year, 10 months ago. 2 comments
by Mike
The first 10 days at the olive farm were my own private meditation retreat – Azure was still in the US and I had all the time to myself, except for when I was working and eating.
I would wake up before sunrise each day and put on some hot water for honey tea, which is my new favorite thing in the world. (Honey is the new sugar… er, the old sugar.) Then I’d write in my journal, meditate, make some breakfast, read, then work from about 8:30am to noon. Lunch was from noon to 1pm or so, then another meditation session, some more reading/writing and a nap. From 2-5 I worked again, then I had more time to read/write, more tea. At around 6 or so I would go into the main house and start a fire in the fireplace and Claude and I would talk and eat until around 8pm. At that point I would head back to my room, write a wrap up of the day, meditate and read until I fell asleep, usually before 9pm.
I learned SO MUCH in this time.
In the above photo (which was not staged for the blog, believe it or not) You can see all my body nourishment on the right, all my brain nourishment on the left, both culminating in the middle with my journal and my tea bowl (they drink tea out of bowls here). One book is “The Spiritual Emmerson,” which is so darn excellent that I can’t get through it because every paragraph is thick with insights. The other is the equally mind-blowing, “In Defense of Food,” (thank you Joanne!) which is my new bible. Needless to say, after reading that book, the nourishment on the right side of the table changed dramatically. Underneath that are “A Year in Provence,” which was almost unbearable, and “Against the Stream,” a Buddhist guide for people trying to live differently in the modern world (thank you Mathew!).
Next to my journal are two note books (one on top of the other). The smaller one is for random notes during the day – addresses and telephone numbers. The larger one was for new French words, but now I’m using it to take notes on sustainable living. In my journal I write about things I want to remember, things I’m trying to figure out, thoughts and feelings, etc. I write in red pen, always.
Also, there is a mini computer, which I didn’t really use, and a French-English dictionary that’s not very good.
On the right, for breakfast, is a baguette, some bread with grains, a tea cake, Camembert, marmalade and olive oil. There’s also water and tea. After reading “In Defense of Food” I switched to fruit, whole grained bread, olive oil and scrambled eggs with spinach (cooked in real butter), with honey tea (just honey with hot water) and water in the mornings.
That’s how I roll.
Posted 1 year, 10 months ago. 1 comment
by Mike
I went for a frosty walk one frosty morning. Here are the frosty pictures. This is from the olive farm (the same one we worked on last year) above Nice.
These cold mornings tended to precede gorgeous days.
(more photos)
Posted 1 year, 10 months ago. 4 comments
by Mike
Claude looked younger in person than she did in my memory, though she assured me that she has, in fact, aged a lot in the last year. She cried on Christmas: her olives froze for the third time in the year, which meant that they’d be useless for jarring and therefore the harvest, and a large chunk of income, was lost. (What she learned while we were there, however, is that they might still be usable for some low-quality oil.)
This kind of winter has never happened before here: Margarite, 89 and living in the same room in which she was born, says the climate is changing. They were looking at the weather in Vancouver during the Olympics and saying, “We wish we’d had their winter.” This farm is on the French Riviera, need I remind you. There were a few toe-numbing mornings when I’d shuffle across my small room, peak out the window and see snowflakes tumbling through the olive leaves.
I told Margarite that maybe I should stop driving my car when I get back home. She looked confused. “I think driving is causing climate change.”
“Nahhh,” she said. Now I was the one that looked confused.
“Yeah, I think it is. It’s industry and chemicals in the air. The industrialized food chain as well.” I said.
“I don’t know…” she said.
“What do you think is making the weather so crazy?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it. But it’s changing.”
Posted 1 year, 10 months ago. Add a comment
Me and the Escort
by Azure
I got a late start from the Chateau and didn’t leave until noon. It was beautiful and sunny for the drive and in the car, it was actually a little too warm (this was a first). Being in a car versus a scooter made me more relaxed. Being warm, I didn’t think about the elements very much and having four wheels made it much more stable and I didn’t have to focus on every bend in the road. I suppose there was a sense of invincibility that went along with knowing I had food, water, and (since I had packed it) bedding from the Chateau. (read more)
From Poitiers, I headed south to Limoges, then turned east to Clermont-Ferrand, then headed south again to Le Puy-en-Velay. Before I got to Le Puy two things happened, it started getting dark and there started to be snow. I didn’t realize it, but I was driving down the center and there was snow the whole way. As it got darker and snowier, the little towns that I was passing got more and more shut down. The hotels had no lights on, so I just kept driving. At around 10pm, I had passed the point of no return and really couldn’t stop and find a place because there weren’t any that were open and I didn’t want to waste the time driving around to find a cheap one.
I started to consider options of where to sleep. Many of the truck drivers pulled over into the picnic areas and slept, but I didn’t know if this was the safest option. My other option was to sleep in a town, where I would risk being seen by passers by. I decided on the latter option and started looking for a town that had a public parking area where the back ends of the cars were darker and a little more secluded than the front. I passed many good options, but was still wide awake, so when I got to Aubenas, I was absolutely exhausted and set on making it work. I found a darkish parking area at the base of the old city, one which held a massive fortified castle of course. I could see the illuminated castle from the front and side windows of my little car-hotel room and from the rear, there was a view over the valley lights, off the cliff on which I was parked. The wind was blowing so hard and I had to double check that the car wouldn’t be blown over the edge. I had also seen a sign for -4 degrees on one of the signs I had passed. Still thinking this wouldn’t be a problem, I curled up in the back and went to sleep with all my clothes on and my rabbit fur hat over my eyes.
When I went to sleep, I was warm and happy, but when i woke up an hour later, it was so cold in the car that I couldn’t even breath the air without a little pain. It didn’t take long after trying and failing to find a way to comfortably breath to decide to keep moving.
I started again around 1am and drove until 5am, this time stopping just after Aix-en-Provence on one of the side of the road picnic area rest stops, which is actually just a little road off the main road with no ammenities or anything or even parking spots. I backed the car under a tree and this time I draped a seat over the front seats and over the back seats, making a little tent above the back seat. This hid me from anyone looking in and it also kept my warm body heat in.
Here, I slept easily for three hours before it got too bright to sleep. It remained warm the whole time, despite rest of the car being freezing. When I got up, I realized I had parked on the edge of a vineyard and the grape vines, which you could see for miles were all covered in snow. The sky was white and it looked like a whiteout.
I kept driving, determined to make the olive farm before lunch. I didn’t quite make it. I missed my exit and ended up in Monaco and had to drive back through Eze. I was so frustrated that I actually yelled in the car. When I heard how annoying I sounded, I stopped. I was still really irritated, but as i pulled back onto the coastal road towards Nice I checked myself, saying aloud, “Oh poor you, you HAVE to drive through Eze, you HAVE to look out over the Mediterranean for an extra 20 minutes, what a rough life you have.” Then I was fine.
I got to the olive farm around 12:30 and parked in front of Claude’s. I knew Mike would be eating at Margarite’s house, so I used the time to brush my teeth and change my clothes. I was just about to walk up to find him and he started walking down the hill. He was dressed in a red plaid flannel shirt, jeans and work boots (coincidentally the same outfit he wore to be a lumberjack for Halloween) and he looked so much bigger than I had remembered. His shoulders made him look like a giant box and i likened him to Sponge Bob.
It was so good to see him and we chatted for an hour straight before I laid down to take a nap while he went back to work.
I had mixed feelings about being back on the olive farm, which I’ll write about later when I have a little more time (Mike is impatient to get on the road this morning), but I just wanted to say that I made it, we’re together, all’s well.
Posted 1 year, 11 months ago. 2 comments
