PANICALE, Umbria – The sounds of chickens clucking, sheep baaing, happy olive pickers helloing back and forth mix and mingle in the air around us. It was foggy first thing in the morning but now the sky is robin’s egg blue. Could it be olive harvest time in Italy? I think so. We’d bolted our morning ration of cappuccino in Masolino’s this morning and walked out of the village gates and down the white road to our day’s work in Elida and Guenter’s olive grove. Oh, the happy pickers may be from the far corners of Portugal, Germany, Maine, San Francisco, Australia and Vermont – but these silver leafed trees with their coal black fruit are Umbria at her finest. Strange, that we are all stranieri here but Guenter has been trained in olive lore by local friends. And at least we had a plan. On our walk here this morning we saw what can happen without one. A wide eyed older man we know had a wooden ladder set up in the road outside his house, a net below it about the size of his shirt. And he was up the tree with his cane, beating away with a vengeance. By late afternoon when we walked back, there was an olive oil slick where he’d rained fruit down on the road and the piddling traffic had “pressed” his olives for him. Looked like I’d parked an old Studebaker there for the day.
So, foreign or not, we certainly were miles ahead of at least one local. He’s locally famous, mostly for his prize winning collection. Of 10,000 or so of those tiny liquor bottles like you get on airlines? Steve from San Francisco said maybe the man only needed enough olive oil for one of those bottles. Allora. But what a day we picked to pick. Kids, dogs, nets, ladders, plastic cartons, plastic rakes, let’s go get us some olives!
HOW OLIVES ARE COAXED OUT OF THE TREE. THE RAKE’S PROGRESS.
In this plan, you spread nets under a tree and reach what you can with your rake or your hand. If you have a rake, it is nothing exotic, just an orange plastic one like you would take to the beach in your yellow plastic bucket. Some rakes were modified to be longer by strapping the orange plastic rake onto a stick with some silver gaffers tape. When you can’t reach any more, even with a stick, someone shinnies up the tree or grabs a ladder and we keep on picking and grinning until everyone agrees That’s close enough. Black olives, green olives, pruning sheers Guenter left up the tree last spring, whatever. Get’em down, we’re only going up that tree and setting up this net the one time.
When you are done with a tree you move the nets around, pouring rivers of olives to a low spot in the net. You lift up that part of the net where they’ve accumulated, slip the net and the olives into a big red plastic box and slip the net out. Vwalaala. All pretty low tech and pretty obvious. So, there you are with a red plastic box of olives, some sticks, some leaves. Sort out the big pieces of extraneous non olive stuff and get ready to move to the next tree. And you’ll want your net so you will pull up stakes and pack it up like a careful giant taking down a circus tent for regular sized people.
OLIVE PICKING TIME. THIS IS WHEN YOU FIND OUT WHO YOUR TRUE FRIENDS ARE
People come from near and far to do this. You’ve read Tom Sawyer I suppose? Everyone has a story of who they can get to help pick. The only topic of conversation in town. And lots of the pickers are of foreign persuasion these days. It’s basically a math problem. Every one here has lots of olive trees and everyone is harvesting at more or less the same time so everyone is scaring up anyone they can find. Every body is booked and all of those olives have got to come down. Now. Before they fall down by themselves and stay hidden in the grass under their drooping limbs. They say olives are no good after they’ve been on the ground for any time at all. So every year, about when daylight savings time tells you to Fall Back, you start picking olives like mad before the nice fall weather goes away and the winter rains begin. You just don’t pick in the rain.
WILL WORK FOR OIL
This was grand. Better than a picnic at the beach. I’ve picked olives on cold, dark and windy December days and I’ll take seventy, sunny and November days – any day. Big fun yakking to the other monkeys up the same trees. And seeing the results of what we’ve done. Our net worth as it were. And of course the owners of the olives have to feed you at some point if they want you to keep on keeping on. At lunch the first day they have covered a table for 12 with salads, pots of soup and a great Portuguese version of Shepards’ Pie called empadas. Add in breads, and cheeses and bottles of wines, waters and of course olive oil and you have a fine reward for an long morning’s exercise. We’re not nearly as productive after lunch. But the days are short and you pick till dark. And then walk home happy and tired.
After dinner that night, I asked Midge what she wanted to do for the rest of the evening. She yawned “Take a bath. Go to bed”. “Sounds pretty good to me” I said stretching and kicking out of my shoes. Pushing up my sleeve I show her my watch. 7:15. PM. Ye Gads. Bed still sounds good. That olive picking is a pretty full body experience. A good day. And a good night to all. See you in the morning. When we’ll do it all over again. Like any good Italian opera, this one isn’t over till the fat lady sings.
Happy Holidays and
See you in Italy,
Stew
We are so slow on the uptake. The festive carved watermelons in town might have been a hint? It appeared to us that the one tent in the piazza was the sad sum total of the Festa. But some patient person took pity on us, took us strangers in a strange land, by the hand and pointed out there were galleries and cantinas open down every alley in town. How did we miss that? Always surprises us when these fun places open up. Day in and day out they present blank, ancient wooden faces to their alleys and we mindlessly walk by. Nope nothing there. Nothing to see here folks. Keep moving. Then, a couple times a year they unbar those doors, swing them open and start slinging wine and bruschetta at you in one and olive oil and local fagiolini (broad beans) in another and so on right around the town. Some are old wine storage places with ancient wine presses or wooden casks left behind for ambience. Some are proper pastel painted galleries with modernistic Italian lighting in their arched ceilings and views over gardens. Totally changes the feel of the town in the Where Are We sense. Once the light bulb went on in our tiny brains we knew where all these cantinas often are and passed ourselves from one to the next buying bottles of wine, jars of saffron, more wine. One place had a fish-based bruschetta which sounds rather odd but tasted rather divine. Benefits of an open mind and, in this case, open mouth. We came, we tried, we liked!
Anyway, what with all this activity we shill-ied and shall-ied a bit too long and 
Part of our company’s welcome was finding a bouquet of our neighbors’ roses on the dining room table. It is interesting to me how this works out. Our neighbor’s garden is right in our face, we don’t have to do a thing and our windows stay full of flowers. And don’t they reflect nicely on the glass table.? The funny thing is that looking out the windows on the other side of the house, it is five stories down to the tiny street below. And on this side of the house, we have roses – above us. That, right there, is when you know you are on a HILL. 
From our perch on Masolino’s balcony we could see another in a string of outrageous sunsets over Lago Trasimeno and Villa LeMura. And we could hear totally different kind of music coming from the Villa. Less church. More modern, jazz-ish music. Perfect dinner music to complement the balmy night breeze there on the balcony. Andrea says it is some rich foreigners’ wedding and that there are people from all over the English speaking world for the event, England, New Zealand, America, South Africa etc. The villa is maybe a half an hour walk away but the night is so still and bright and clear that the sound travels well and the music is gently all around us and occasionally you can hear hints of laughing happy voices mixed in with the music. 
LA GIOCONDA DA GIOIELLA
This is an interesting book, seventy years old but there are parts of it that seem to be talking about where we are today. A classic Italian story from WW2. By Ignazio Silone who was born Secondo Tranquilli but had to write under a pen name to keep out of the clutches of the Fascists. My copy is the 1962 re-edited version of the 1935 original. It is an anti war book in a sense, certainly a book that refuses to glorify or glamorize war. It shows the futility of blindly and illogically following the crowd whether politically, religiously, or any other way. Considering Silone himself was in exile for years and that the Fascists beat and tortured his brother to death, this was a calm, considered book. Maybe a bit bleak, but not totally hopeless. Close. But he made his points.