The hills are olive (page 3)
There is a table laden with pomegranates, and braces of
lavender in the garden trumpet the occasional flower. How can
the pendulous persimmon trees still be so brazen in their
orangeness?
The vista from the villa tumbles down past an old barren fig
tree and across a hillscape so captivating, it will surely entice you
to toss over that high-pressured job in the big city. Nestled up
in the hills, you can see Cortona, where American food writer
Frances Mayes wrote Under the Tuscan Sun, a memoir of her
experiences restoring a Tuscan villa. Couldn't that be me?
I have not yet shed Toronto. Here is what I've learned thus
far: before one strips a tree of her fruit, one must place around
her base a massive net. (It is said that after the Second World
War, the farmers here in Tuscany used parachutes instead of nets
to assist them in their olive harvest.) The net has a single slit
through to its middle so that the trunk of the tree can be girdled,
rather like a skirt for a Christmas tree. Once the net is in place,
its border must be turned over to prevent the rolling escape of
the plucked olives.
For a time, I attach a bruscola, or handwoven basket, around
my waist. I place the nifty new gloves on my hands and
commence the slow process of plucking the olives one by
one and placing them in the basket. This, I can quickly see,
is immensely therapeutic.
On the other hand, there are 1,000 trees(!) to attend to.
I come to prefer the just-as-popular basket-free stance. One
plants one's feet on the net and commences the silent mantra
of remembering never to take a step before checking first: a
stepped-on olive is an unhappy, quickly fermenting olive.
I come to shed the gloves too. I like the feel of the sturdy,
indomitable leaves upon my city hands, the plumpness of the
smooth black orbs. I become rather good at this. Drawing my
hand quickly down the bough, I nudge the olives - plick,
plick, plick - from their birthplace and let them tumble to the
ground. If you like, a small hand rake, or pettino, can be used.
I reach higher. The sun is warm. My co-pluckers are gathered
in circles around trees: Donna and her 87-year-old mother
Frances; the fiercely funny and intelligent Sue; Michael the silver
dealer from Dallas; the California restaurateurs, Frank and
Jami, and their teenage children Gray and Gabriella; Art and
Charice, intrepid travellers still after 50 years of marriage; and
my villa roommate Karen, a rollicking horticulturalist from
St. Louis.
This group drifts together and apart into subgroups as one
tree appears to be almost stripped and another is begging to be
commenced. Circles form and tease apart and re-form as if this
were orchestrated and someone were composing a new opera:
The Dance of the Olive Pickers.
The olives, naturally enough, do not stop growing at my full
height of five-foot-two. I swiftly learn that there are few feelings
quite so transporting as to hoist one's self up into the middle
of an olive tree, climbing ever higher as if this were Winnipeg
in the 1950s and I were five years old.
I also learn that it takes half a day to let down my big-city
determination to strip a tree quickly bare and all by myself. The
defining moment occurs when Sue approaches and removes one
of her ear buds and places it in my ear. Suddenly, the hillside is full not just of olives but of Luciano Pavarotti. I try very, very
hard not to weep.
Once an olive tree is free of her olives, the nets are gently
raised. The olives are jostled along the net into piles, then carefully
transferred to plastic crates before being placed on an
adorable blue Ape (pronounced ah-pay), a three-wheeled affair
that looks more toy than truck.
This is such good work, such true work, one almost doesn't
need Johns' foodie ministrations. But she is so superb at it. I can
see her sitting at the charming restaurant in Monticchiello.
She has pre-arranged a private wine-tasting dinner at which we
will sample the pecorino cheese of the region, and the incomparable
salami with fennel seeds. We are served a Chianti, and
then a Vino Nobile before a swooning Brunello, the red wines
made from Sangiovese grapes for which the area is most
famous. In this candlelit scene, Johns is telling the tale of the
fabled frost of 1985, and of her own first harvest six years ago
and of the characteristics of Tuscan oil. Peppery. Herbal. And
what is the word for that pepperiness? "Pizzico,” she says.
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