The next morning I arose bright and early, 9 hours of solid rest leading to abnormal perkiness on my part. Still full from going to bed on a stomach packed with pasta, I skipped breakfast in favor of black espresso, and went to sit in the back yard, watching to see if the gentleness of the morning sun softened the harsh landscape. As the ground was too wet from rain to begin on the olives, the morning was spent, under Christopher’s direction, painting the doors that were to go in the new house. A rather fetching blue- the color of cold, silt-swamped water that reminded me of the creeks on Kennesaw Mountain- had been chosen. In the sunlight, it was beautiful. Hours into the process but still well before lunch time, the other members of this hodgepodge of a family began to arrive. First, the father, who was precious, grinning from ear to ear, hair stark white and thick, his giant sunglasses giving him coolness in manner of a 50’s Hollywood star. He barked greetings robustly and warmly in Siciliano, shaking my one paint-free hand with both of his rough paws.

Emerging from the car after him was the elusive Eleonora, in the flesh. She was a beautiful woman, young, with dark, curly Sicilian hair cropped short on her neck, and blue eyes lined with yellow. She embraced me in a rather familiar hug, which I assumed was warranted due to our both having the same name and months’ worth of email correspondence. She was lovely, and dressed in a cashmere cardigan and tailored pants. Not work clothes, by any means, but she didn’t hesitate to take the brush from my hand and begin filling in missed spots on the doors. I obligingly went and retrieved another paint brush from the shed, and we spent the rest of the morning talking. I really enjoyed talking to her, and our conversations were almost all in Italian, though she spoke great English. We had a lot to discuss concerning Slow Food, organic agriculture, and other things in this category. I asked a lot of questions about the olives; I wanted to get to the bottom of how this would be done, what types of olives they used, when and why they were harvested, and how, and the difference between salt curing and oil curing for table olives.

She explained graciously, but highlighted the issue at hand, which was the weather. The olives were ready to be picked, and they needed to be, as soon as possible. The earlier they are picked the more flavor they have. When left on the vine longer, they produced more oil, but the flavor and quality of the oil is lost. Big olive oil producers, therefore, traded the amount of oil that they are able to produce for the quality of the oil, waiting until later in the season to make a higher profit in more kilos of oil. For this family, however, the flavor was key, and what they strove for, producing less oil with higher quality. The olives were ready now, but the mud on the ground, which was ample, as the terrain was all dirt without the aid of grass and brush to help drain, prevented the picking. Mud would tarnish the taste. It was therefore important to not wait only for a clear day, but a day when the land was dry. Also, there was this thing about her jaw…some sort of dental ailment that caused her jaw to move out from her skull, forcing her to wear a retainer and causing her great pain. For this, she had to travel to and from Palermo almost every day for dentists’ appointments. An incredible inconvenience, but one that she hoped to work through this harvest season.

Lunch was ready about one, and we all trudged in and squeezed around the tiny kitchen table. Lunch was pasta with tomatoes and sausage, fresh baked bread, spicy olive oil and a variety of table olives (all made in-house), and a tiny bowl of caponata, a Sicilian antipasto of garlic, eggplant and peppers. I was in love with the olives, some which were giant and black and oozed a heady, spicy oil, big enough to take bites of, while others were smaller and green, salted to the point of puckering the mouth, relieved with a bath of oil and garlic.

It was during this lunch that the next WWOOFer was to arrive. No one could quite remember whether she was British or American (or German, maybe), or whether she was old or young. Such suspense!

And then in walked Zoe: All-American, for sure (Boston), and young enough to make even me, only five years her senior, sigh with envy. 20 years old, bright blue eyes, wispy Indian-blond curls pinned on her head, petite, delicate frame, she came in clearly exhausted from her travels but billowing a breath of warmth and tranquility, none the less. Having traveled since the crack of dawn that morning, flying from Rome to Palermo and wrangling herself as I had done to that desolate train station in the middle of an abandoned part of Sicily, she was tired but kind and made a wonderful effort to speak Italian and smile warmly and humbly at her new hosts.
Eleonora pulled me aside almost immediately after lunch.

“I don’t know if she’s going to work out here,” she told me conspiratorially.

“Why?” I asked. As far as I could tell she seemed sweet and eager enough. I mean, hell, she was 20 and she was here. Clearly, she was here for a reason, probably having something to do with wanting to make olive oil.

“She doesn’t seem to be a hard worker, not like us” she said bizarrely, as we had only just finished eating, and who was ‘us’? “You keep your eye on her; we may have to tell her to go”.

Thinking that this whole assessment of Zoe’s character and her future career at this farm was completely premature and strange, I nodded and mumbled, “um, ok”, and continued with my work. Two minutes later Zoe popped out of the house, ready to help paint, ready to put her exhaustedness aside in order to help us finish the doors. There, I thought, this should abate Eleonora’s paranoia.

Aside from Laura and the mom, the family and other guests left later that afternoon to return to Palermo. I took a long walk, heading for an hour in one direction and reaching absolutely nothing, no semblance of civilization, but watching an amazing sunset over a hillside patch of vineyards, the red grapes still hanging ripe and sundrenched on the vine. Dinner was left over pasta, which began to send distress signals to my already pasta-stuffed body. I tried to eat only a few bites, nibbling instead on delicious, tangy pomegranate seeds and olives. Zoe and I watched the clock strike 8pm, 9pm, 9:30pm, finally giving in before the moon was even high in the sky and hopping into bed.

Our task for the next day, once again organized and delegated by the increasingly odd Christopher, was to pick walnuts from the walnut grove. Laura packed us what I thought was a lunch, and we set off about 9am, bamboo sticks in hand. To reach the walnut grove we had to drive a little ways, around the backside of the mountain. The ground was muddy in a way that I was not familiar with. Partially dry and cracked on top, but deep, it was the kind of mud that one had to stomp through, climb over, my boots becoming heavier with each step. The grove was marvelous, though. Christopher dropped us off, explaining that we were to fill as many crates as we could and return around 4pm. Our lunch was packed as a pic-nic to eat there. Zoe and I were fine with this, finding the work relaxing and enjoyable. I don’t think we spoke for the first 3 hours, each of us wandering our own way, beating the trees madly with our bamboo rods and collecting the gorgeous brown nuts from their sticky green armor. The air was fresh and the wet earth seemed to steam as the heat rose toward noon.

For lunch we convened at the base of the grove. Making little benches out of our crates, we examined our lunch. A Tupperware filled with tomatoes, olive oil and canned tuna, a big hunk of bread, two apples. As at least there was a large portion of tomatoes and canned tuna, I consented that I would be well-fed. But poor Zoe: she doesn’t eat fish! In fact, she is a vegetarian.

*I would like to state right now that though one of my most stringent codes for life is to distrust vegetarians on principle- as in, what in the world is wrong with them? What sort of person doesn’t love pork products?- Zoe has abated all fears and proved me wrong. Vegetarians are beautiful, wise, and culinarily extraordinary people, too.*

So, Zoe couldn’t eat our box of tomatoes and tuna, and instead subsisted rather gallantly on bread, olive oil, and her apple.

Lunch was pleasant. We began to get to know each other a little, explaining where we came from and who we are and what we are giving back to the world. I found her almost unbelievably composed, mature and graceful for such a young age. I remembered myself at 20: a cute, hopeful disaster, drunken and in search of something I couldn’t visualize, going through what was both at the time and in retrospect the darkest period of my life, but having the resilience nevertheless to remember to have fun, make friends, and pretend like nothing bad was happening (classic coping mechanism, and I am in favor of it 100% in some cases). At 20 I dreamed still of going to Italy, but couldn’t pull myself together enough to go. Athens held too much allure to take a semester off, and I think I lacked the courage, anyway. 20 was when I painted my bedroom hot pink and listened to Neutral Milk Hotel on vinyl until the needle went dull and tried to go out downtown and create chaos around me in order to forget the real chaos going on back home. It worked. Zoe, refreshingly, seemed free of such chaos, not at all jaded or jet-lagged from teenager-hood. I found her meek (in the true sense of the word, not what people mistakenly substitute for ‘weak’), graceful, intelligent and fun, and I was happy to know her.

4o’clock came faster than one would expect, and we packed up to trudge home. This is when that “inability to judge distance” thing came into play for real. The landscape was so stark, so full of shadow and deep, flat colors, that it was almost impossible to tell which way to go home. The mountains were higher and harder to walk than they seemed, the ravines deeper, the valleys longer. We had to step high to pull our boots out of the mud, and step wide to avoid holes and crazy, evil cactuses’ that swung and spit. It felt like being lost in a time warp, on mars, and I sighed with relief when suddenly the house was upon us.

As this was Sunday, Laura and the mama had gone back to Palermo, leaving Zoe and I with weird-o Christopher. His position within the family had been only slightly cleared up from the weekend of seeing them all interact. He seemed more of a grounds keeper than anything, though I think I forced myself to think about it from this angle, instead of the other, which was that he was, definitely, Laura’s boyfriend. What could have inspired this romance, I could not begin to imagine. Laura was, by all accounts, a beautiful girl. She was a lawyer, 29 years old, seemingly composed, friendly, bubbly even. Christopher was…stinky. Laura would come behind him and nuzzle his neck, and I felt like gagging for her. How could she sleep next to him, I wondered? Christopher also revealed, I believe during the time Zoe arrived and we were all giving our personal introductions, that he was only 24. Some Benjamin Button shit was going on, for real. Christopher looked somewhere, anywhere, between 35 and 80. He had a story similar to mine: travel through Italy without a grasp of the language and a loss of where to begin, and then love comes along and one finds the inspiration to speak. His Italian was not bad, for sure, as I know perfectly well the hardships of learning a language from scratch. I will be eternally kind to foreigners and anyone who even gives uttering a foreign word a try; Christ knows, I survive on the kindness of those whose language I butcher on a daily basis. But that accent! Italian via a British accent is not kind on the ears. It sounded like he was speaking with his mouth full of food, and I found it hard to look at him when he was speaking Italian, as though I would be forced to see something stomach-turning.

As I said, the family had left, leaving just the three of us. It was at this point that I started to notice that we had been left with basically nothing in the ay of food. bags of pasta, some potatoes, odd unrefrigerated eggs. Tomatoes and a couple zucchini. Dinner was pretty much silent, Zoe and I glancing at each other intermittently to reassure ourselves that the other was still there. 9:30 came around, and we hit the sack. There was nothing else to do.

The next day brought pouring, cold rain. We couldn’t leave the tiny house for fear of being washed away in the storm, so Christopher set us the task of mending nets. The nets for the olive trees are both enormous and tightly woven, leaving tiny slits and holes throughout, tears from past branches and rocky ground. At a certain point one has to wonder, is this just a time-killing task? What is the cost of a new net, truly? Both Zoe and I spent 7 hours that day sewing up holes in the same net, and it was still tattered by the time we just said fuck it and wadded it back up to get it out of our sight. Numerous cups of hot tea were consumed, DVDs were watched, the storm raged on. Christopher told us that since this rain would delay picking olives for another couple of days, we could have the next day as our day off. This was intended as some sort of cruel joke, I now know, because what’s the point of a day off when there is nowhere to go?

Zoe and I were not deterred. We needed to leave our tiny Sicilian island, and we were willing to put on our hiking shoes to get to wherever there was to go. I, personally, was to the point of going into some sort of carnivorous shock: I needed to find MEAT, a salad and a glass of red wine. My system was screaming for help, the withdrawal of iron, fiber and tannins from my body having “sealed my valve”, to put it nicely. The next morning we popped over to the other part of the house, the part that was being remodeled. A small crew of “workers” came every day, an older boss and two younger ones, Michele, who had picked me up at the station, and some other cute boy who was (unfortunately for Zoe) engaged. We asked them as clearly and as pointedly as possible, where could we go? On foot, naturally. They looked at us blankly, blinked, and then the cute one said, “Nowhere”. As though that ended it. But, we asked, if we walked to the nearest town (their eyes widened), how long would that take? An hour, two, three? It was decided that it would take at least 3, and that it was, for all intents and purposes, futile. There was nowhere to go. We thanked them, took a bag of cookies from the cabinet for our provisions, and set out anyway.

An hour into the trip it started to rain, and we had not passed even a house. We walked purposefully and determinedly, Zoe dreaming of adventure and perhaps a romantic, Sicilian café with fresh cannolli, me dreaming of a giant steak, however the Sicilians preferred to prepare it. The panorama was gorgeous, but foreboding. It became apparent after a time that the “next town” was not “just over the hill” as I had hopefully predicted. It was nowhere in sight. Finally, after 2 hours, we reached the train station, still as deserted as ever, and we sat the 40 minutes to await the next train to Vallelunga. It was an easy 5 minute train ride that left us at another deserted train station at the bottom of a valley, still out of sight of any semblance of a town. Some nice old man and his daughter, reading the blinding neon sign on our backs that read “Lost Americans”, offered us a ride. They dropped us at the edge of town, in front of a café. It was begun to sprinkle, and the town looked brown and utterly deserted, so we gave up the idea of a glorious restaurant/bar/theatre offering dinner and a show full of culture and intrigue, and went inside the beaded curtain.
In this weird place we were offered lunch, at least. Bad spaghetti with tomatoes, but at least mine contained pancetta. The seafood salad was good, and the olives were nice and green as well. I was so famished I could not have cared less anymore. Obscene Italian music videos played on the TV, and I called FL rudely from the table and bitched for a moment about the absurdity of my Sicilian diet so far. Bless him; he completely understood, commiserated even. Promised me steak upon my return, gave me the strength, as always, to look on the bright side. Zoe and I ate our lunch nervously, our ears and eyes assaulted by lingerie-clad women in 3D on the television, beginning to wonder how exactly we were going to get back to the farm…

We called Eleonora, who refused to aid us. It was now raining and we were wondering what recourse we had for being rescued. Another WWOOFer, David, was due to arrive at the Villalba train station that afternoon. Surely, we assumed, if we took the train to meet him there, we could catch a ride back with whoever came to retrieve him (surely, we assumed, someone would be retrieving him). This idea was coldly and absurdly ignored, as neither nor Christopher nor Eleonora seemed to be receptive to a plan so simple. We were “on foot”, she said, basically wishing us luck. It made no sense what so ever.

Trudging back to the Vallelunga train station, we awaited a train that never arrived. Realising that we had two hours before David was scheduled to arrive, we gave up, and began to walk. If we could just get to the Villalba train station, we assured ourselves, whoever came to get David couldn’t refuse to give us passage as well. It began to rain, off and on the whole 2 hour journey. Zoe laughed every now and then and shook her head. “This is so absurd,” she said, “I cannot believe this is what is happenening in my life right now”.

The walk from Vallelunga to the Villalba train station (which was, to clear this up, a courtesy title and nowhere near the town of villalba) was just as long as the one before it, but colder. Our spirits remained high, however. At some point, we knew, we would reach the house. It was just a matter of when, and whether we would be soaking wet on arrival. Several cars stopped, but they were all full of men, and even in our state we knew better than to take rides from strangers. Our parents would never, ever know what happened to us, if something were to, and we couldn’t take that risk.

When the Villalba train station finally loomed up at us, we saw a tall be-backpacked figure standing on the curb, and we knew it must be David. He was talking into the window of a car, with someone who, it turns out, was not only the man who owned another WWOOF farm down the road, but a cousin of the family that we were currently staying with. He has errands to run, he said, but if we were all still standing out here like lost little lambs when he returned, he would give us a ride. He sped off, and David, Zoe and I began to piece together what in the hell was happening in this place. David was older, 39, but apparently a stringent life of meditation, yoga, and a diet void of salt and sugar had either preserved or reinstated his youth; he looked not a day over 28. He was British, he was kind and warm, he was on some sort of life journey to explore his soul and the workings of the cosmos, and had chosen Italy randomly on a map as his place to come WWOOF. Arriving from Catania that morning, he said, he had encountered a number of obstacles and other things that he could now interpret as signs to not go to this strange farm here in the middle of nowhere. But, as signs often are, he deciphered them too late, ignored their message, and now here he was. Zoe and I did our best to fill him in on the situation at the house. We couldn’t even comprehend where he was going to sleep in that tiny house, and were even more confounded when Eleonora’s father, in his tiny two-seater truck, sped by, slowing briefly enough to explain that there was yet another WWOOFer, at the Vallelunga train station, that he was going to go retrieve. We should just start walking.

10 minutes into our treck, the man from the other WWOOF farm drove back by, and helped us cram ourselves into his back seat. He asked a number of suspicious questions about his cousins’ farm, including how many hours a day they had us working, where we were sleeping, and whether Eleonora was at the house, presently. I said no, and he replied, “meno male. We don’t get along too well”.

Hm. Also, told us to keep in mind that he ran both a restaurant and made wine, so if we ever needed a night “out”, to come on over. He used to have the WWOOFers over for parties, he said, but the family didn’t like that very much. So we were just to call and pop by when we were able to get out on our own.

My head spun like a slot machine with these bit of suspicious information, and David added his own two-cents: the man at the farm he had just left had wished him luck with Eleonora and this farm, mentioning that Eleonora was notoriously difficult and flighty.

Things did not bode well.

Just as we arrived and had settled into the kitchen, pots of water on the stove to make us all a well-deserved cup of tea, the father showed up with the other WWOOFer. His name was Chris. American as well, 20 as well, just as blond and blue-eyed and big-grinned and adorable as he could be, he blew into our weird little mix with a breath of down to earth, unassuming, light-hearted and amusing air, one that we greatly needed to take the pressures off of a situation that was beginning to get sort of soggy and sad.

Thinks started to look up.

With this gaggle of WWOOFers I think we all knew that we could at least have fun amongst ourselves, despite whatever weirdness lay in store. Dinner, though sparse and unendingly starchy, was not silent anymore, and there were enough different personalities in the house to drown out Christophers heavy, british boredom, jokes to crack and stories to tell.

I, for one, despite my aching feet, slept a little better that night.