Picking Olives in Andalucia (Check)

I've gotten so swept up in the holiday bustle (teaching the kids “jingle bells” and planning the vacation) that I’ve gotten a bit behind on my blogging. Aside from the excitement of getting my car and driving all over the region, the weekend before last I also went olive picking! Some friends of ours have a grove that’s been in their family for generations; the trees themselves are around 200-300 years old. Everyone here thought I was absolutely nuts for wanting to do it, “it’s such hard work, and boring!” they said, but I kept telling them, “I’m a farm girl, I’m not afraid of hard work.” The tools required for olive picking are as follows: A giant cane (bamboo works well), an oversized comb, and netting. The netting is placed under the tree to catch the olives as one beats the tree with the cane. It seems a bit wrong to violently beat the unprovoking trees senseless and I prefer the much gentler method of the comb. The rhythm of olive picking is composed of the fluid swish of the comb raking through the leaves, the wack of the canes hitting the upper branches and the plop of the olives raining to the ground. After the poor trees were pummeled we all sat in a circle and sorted through the olives before depositing them into an old feed sack. After two trees, we braked for lunch. The mother of the family, a tiny woman with hummingbird like energy, had prepared a feast over the coals of the open fire. No Spanish meal is complete without at least 3 types of meat and potatoes in some form. I’m not sure if it was the sun or the work, but the pork was the most savory, flavorful pork I’d ever eaten. After a few more hours of work the sun advised us that it was time to pack up. This meant carting our tools and sacks of olives up a hill to the van. Having grown accustomed to carrying feed and hay bales while working in California, I hoisted one of the forty pound bags and began trudging up the hill; a sight which absolutely shocked the Spaniards (what, a woman is actually capable of doing man’s work!?!)
Mamá (that’s what I’ll refer to her as since I’m not entirely sure I was introduced to her as anything different) insisted that she pay us for our labor in oranges. So off we set in to the dusk to pick oranges. By the time we arrived to their grove, a bumpy over the river and through the sage brush ride away (it was a good christening for my car), it was completely dark and we had to pick oranges by star light. I followed Mamá who zoomed through the underbrush, periodically shooting up to grasp a particularly large orange. Not wanting us to get scurvy, we filled my trunk to the brim; I some how ended up with three bags to myself. I tried to make orange marmalade this week but it ended up more like a runny syrup, perhaps it will be good on pancakes. Ummmmm, pancakes...