sicilia pt. 3

That Wednesday was spent doing odds and ends around the yard. The ground was too wet to pick the olives, so we were each assigned tasks to help further the cause of the damned unfinished house. I began to repaint doors to give final touches, head phones on, as happy as could be under the circumstances. After a while, Eleonora and the rest of the family graced us with their presence. For some reason, it was important to her that the shed beside the house, which was basically cement walls and dirt floors filled with rusty tools, paint cans and stacks of dirty ceramic tiles, be cleaned out. Swept even. I went along with it, taking arm loads of sharp tiles from one pile in the corner over to Christopher, who was stacking them again pointlessly in another corner. After a bit Zoë came in, and asked with a hand in folding one of the giant olive nets. Christopher had delegated this thankless job to her this morning, and she had been in the back yard for hours, tranquil and committed to her task. Eleonora snapped at her immediately.
“The net can wait. Do something. Sweep.”
Christopher went off to find her another broom to use in the idiotic task of sweeping a dirt floor, but Eleonora didn’t even give poor Zoe time to get started.
“Look, you are not doing anything. You want to be here, you have to work. You are not doing a good job, like her.”
She pointed to me, and my mouth dropped in confusion.
“If you want to leave, leave, but you cannot stay here and sleep!”
There was a totally awkward silence that followed. I think both Zoe and I were in shock, and Christopher (douche bag, clearly), knowing full well that Zoe had been off doing the job that he had prescribed for her, said nothing.
“I’ll do whatever you want me to do,” Zoe said, completely composed and stoic. I think I might have been in tears, if not enraged. Day in and day out of these bullshit tasks, and for nothing but cold showers, skimpy pastas, and no thanks what so ever.
Eleonora just sort of shook her head, and we all started sweeping.
“That was bullshit!” I told Zoe when Eleonora left the room. Like a champ, though, Zoe just shrugged it off.
Finally, on Thursday, the ground was deemed dry enough to begin. Happily, we woke at dawn, crammed our sleepy mouths with cookies and jam, and sipped our respective hot morning beverages. The air was frigid at 7:30am, but I think it energized us all. Starting together on one of the biggest, oldest trees on the farm, Laura and Christopher vaguely explained and demonstrated what went in to harvesting the olives.
It was easy: you took the preferred olive branch and pulled down in a sweeping motion, popping off all the olives one by one. They fell to the ground, heavy as pebbles, and landed on the net, which was wrapped in a wide circle around the base of the tree. The larger trees could take hours, even with 6 people working on them. Someone had to climb way up high in the braches to reach the top, bending the longer, suppler limbs over to the ground for someone else to work on.
Olive trees are amazing. The colors are iridescent and shimmery, green gliding into silver and purple and back to green. They were happy trees that seemed to hug you when you climbed up into them, and helped you out when you needed to bend their branches to find the fruit. They were incredibly limber and light. The olives surprised me with their firmness; they were as big and as heavy as grapes, and as hard as nuts. Ranging from bright green to almost pitch black depending on their ripeness, some were spotted, some striped, some almost tie-dyed with green and purple. The work was constant but went fast- before long the day was done, and though we were all famished (lunch had been, unnervingly, more pasta- the provisions in the house were dangerously low; we didn’t even have garlic!) no one seemed to mind the work. With such an incredible view over the mountains, the fresh air and these kind trees, I think we were all thrilled to finally have true work to do, and it felt so rewarding to see the bins full of olives at the end of the day.
At the end of our Intro to Olive Harvesting day, Marianna arrived. All four of her grandparents had come from Italy, and she looked the part: wild black curls, olive skin, dark eyes. Her age was indeterminate- a youthful face and energy had me at first placing her in her 20’s; her life stories, openness and insightfulness, however, pointed to years’ worth of experience and adventures already under her belt.
Marianna camped out in the bedroom with me and Zoë; we were crowded, but the body heat added warmth to the freezing nights. At dinner that night, which was, I believe, an amazing frittata made by Chris (who was a culinary school graduate and a genius with compiling the sparse ingredients at our fingertips to make something really spectacular), we spottily filled Marianne in on the weirdness at hand. The family had not returned and Laura was there to help harvest olives almost begrudgingly; the food situation had left us naively hoping that the family would return the next day with groceries, and the hot water heater was a lie.
This conversation led to the discussion of WWOOF in general, as an organization. All of us were here under different pretexts and for different lengths of time, but we were after the same thing: hard work and enthusiasm in exchange for kindness and experience.
Zoe was in Italy all fall as a break from school, which was private and intellectually severe and demanded a work load that she needed a moment of peace from. Though she spoke what must have been fluent Spanish (thus making her comprehension of Italian absolutely phenomenal), she chose Italy instead; she had family members from Sicily, and had traveled here before with her family, so it seemed a natural, safe bet. Well-organized before hand, she had delegated three weeks of her travels to Sicily, enough time to harvest olives and travel a bit before heading back up north. The farm that she had stayed at in Tuscany for the five weeks prior to her arrival in Sicily had been wonderful. A beautiful place, fantastic people, it seemed to be the essence of what one longs for in a WWOOFing experience: somewhere you are sad to leave and can always return to.
David had no real plans. That was part of his larger life goal at this point, to get lost and be well doing it. He hoped to stay a year in Italy WWOOFing around, and would go, he figured, where the wind took him. No Italian language skills to speak of, no clear knowledge even of the country itself, he had chosen Italy randomly off a map of the globe, and booked a flight.
Chris had come for 6 weeks, a random, last minute time-killer after his graduation from the Culinary Institute of America. One of his chefs had recommended Sicily as a place to really begin to understand food, and the kid had booked a ticket, reserving a spot on this farm and this farm only. He was easy going to the point of security; he would stay at this one farm for 6 weeks, work and be fed and housed, and take what he could from it, no travel or confusion needed. He spoke no Italian and had in fact never been outside of the US before in his life. A virgin passport. I balked at the thought of this, an unknowing, totally unprepared trip to Sicily. Even I, speaking the language and having time to get my bearings in this country for a while now, was hesitant to come to Sicily. I wasn’t scared, I knew I would be fine, but this wasn’t a place to take lightly.
Marianna’s story for finding herself in this place was by far the most complex of all. Shedding her former life in manner of a phoenix, dwindling her possessions and selling her part ownership in a successful jewelry business, she had allowed herself the confidence to forego all security and permanence in exchange for her freedom, and the pursuit of a new passion. She had enrolled in culinary school, the French Culinary Institute in New York City. Starting next summer, the class was to take the form of the better part of a year spent in New York, with a mandatory (bahh) 4 month period focusing on Italian food working under a chef in some TBD region of Italy. Knowing this was coming, she had decided to achieve a life-long goal: coming to explore the country of her roots, the land of her grandparents and theirs. The plan was to tour Italy to get a grasp, beforehand, of what she needed to take in from her time in school. I found this brave, romantic and commendable, to say the least.
For these reasons we found ourselves all together, at this place that none of us had ever known existed, no internet or nearby town for comfort from the outside world, working and living together on blind trust toward our hosts, whom we could only hope were as nice as their WWOOF profile suggested.
That next morning we set out again to tackle more trees. These were younger, and we could pair off to work on them, two to a tree, our groups weaving in and out as we made our way steadily down the rows. I was paired with Marianne, which was wonderful. We talked all morning long, and I found in her a kindred spirit of sorts, someone I could easily talk to and understand. Chris was paired with Laura, and looked so damned cute in his red hoodie, hood up and headphones in. A veritable migrant worker. Christopher and David set off on their trek through the grove, David talking non-stop in his tranquil British accent, the two of them babbling about the UK and the horrors of cities and the perks of meditation, I imagined. Zoe was a lone wolf; we learned later that she was specifically set apart from the groups by Laura. Apparently as bizarrely obsessed with Zoë’s work ethic as her sister (Zoe’s work ethic, btw, was fantastic. She was never tired, never complained, and just as strong and diligent as anyone else), Laura had snappishly set Zoe the task of picking the tiny baby trees by herself. She did so gracefully and elegantly, a printed silk scarf tied about her head; it was this, as Marianne put it, that may very well be the essence of Zoe.
Lunch came fast once again, and we were thrilled to find Zoe in the kitchen slaving over a hot lunch (pasta) packed with what vegetables she could get her hands on (zucchini). After lunch, during our short hour of rest, with no end to the monotony of our diet in sight, Zoe, Chris and I began rummaging through the cabinets to see what we could scrounge up. There wasn’t much: about 20 cans of tomato sauce, some dried beans and bags of pasta, bottles of what appeared to be vinegar, anchovies, and a small jar of sun dried tomatoes. For the past week that I had been there, and the days that the others had been present as well, we had been given free reign of the meager kitchen. Told to make lunch some days, or asked to help with dinner, Eleonora had upon her first day present shown me the cabinet for such things as oil and olives, and told me to use them when needed. On this day of our last ditch exploration to find sustenance (because, seriously, what were about to have for dinner??), we opened a bottle of what appeared to be vinegar. It was not. It was booze! Fireworks went off in Chris’ eyes, and mine as well. Sampling a tiny nip, we laughingly concluded that it was some sort of dark, licorice infused alcohol, most definitely made in-house. At some point during this procedure, Laura walked in, saw the chaos of all the canned and bottled goods on the floor, heard our hopeful mumblings of, “we’re trying to find something to eat for dinner”, and took a bag of beans over to the stove. She would cook, she said, which ended the fun. We packed up and went back to the fields to finish the rest of the day.
Later that evening we all convened, exhausted from our labors this time, famished for sure. Chris looked in the pot of soup that Laura had put together and winced. “This is not going to be enough,” he whispered. Indeed, the pot was only ½ full, far less than 6 hungry people needed. And the bread? A portion large enough for one was cut into 6, and set on the table next to a cold bowl of potato stew (wonderful, made by Zoë), which was clearly to be a backup when the soup inevitably ran out. We ate guardedly, our spoons hitting the bottom of the bowl before even the third bite. The left over potato stew was divided among the boys.
At the end, a large hunk of cheese appeared mercifully on the table. My eyes lit up with joy, love and relief, cracking everyone up. We were each cut a piece, and we chewed slowly. “I don’t want the cheese to end”, Zoe muttered sweetly.
After dinner, I decided to try a little of the liquor. It was powerful, and Chris, Zoe, Marianne and I sipped a bit before going to bed, as it went well with cookies and did a better job than tea. As it had been out on the counter all day, I assumed it wasn’t anything valuable, and we recapped it and stuck it back in the cabinet only slightly lessened.
Sleep came heavy, warm and fast, thankfully.