It was a late fall afternoon when I arrived in Contrada Noce. I stood on the tiled veranda of the house where I'd stay for the next three weeks as I learned to harvest olives. Sicily is still warm that time of year, and the sun’s gauzy rays fell on my bare arms; in the valley below soft hills of tilled earth folded down toward a dried-up river bed. The saddle of a mountain rose behind the house, its craggy gypsum peaks pocked with wild asparagus and fennel. I watched as the Tyrrhenian blue sky softened to purple.
Contrada Noce is a rough patch of remote farmland in Sicily that none of the Italians I met en route had ever heard of. Located outside the medieval village of Caccamo, its name roughly translates to “walnut land,” but I came in search of a different crop. My family on both sides were farmers for generations (apples, mainly), a link that was broken in my grandparents' time—meaning I now sit at a computer for the majority of my work life. But I love to cook and bake, and I was curious about the work it takes for agriculture to become food. Olive oil is a product I reach for almost every day, yet I hardly knew a thing about it. Never content to take someone’s word for things, or watch a YouTube video for that matter, I decided to learn about olive oil by participating in a harvest. At least that’s what I told people, including myself, when I chose to take this trip.
When people asked where I was going and why, I handed out neat little answers about the virtues of manual labor and my own agri-curiosity, but I could always feel the asterisk rolling around on my tongue.
A few months earlier, my parents’ 34-year marriage had imploded spectacularly on a windy weekend visit to see me. The details vary, but the contours will be familiar: Mom found emails, Dad came out, and the life they built together fell apart like wet crackers. Within a few months, my parents were separated, lawyered up, divorcing.
The speed of their separation sent me spinning. I still referred to them as “my parents” and refused the implicit “my Mom” and “my Dad.” I wanted for all of this simply to un-happen. But since that was proving unlikely, I chose the second-best option: running away under the guise of self-enrichment, learning to harvest olives instead of navigating the vocabulary and rituals of change.
Through the limitless magic of the internet, I found a retired British couple, Tony and Lyn, who live in Sicily and needed a hand with their harvest in exchange for room and board. Two planes, three trains, and one slithering drive up into the mountains later, I arrived to find myself wrapped in warm mountain air, listening to the bleating and the bells of the neighbor’s sheep, ready to learn about olive oil, ready to forget everything else.
We set to work in the cool of the morning. Lyn handed me a hollow yellow rake that looked more like a child’s beach toy than a tool. She pulled it through the trees’ thin grey stems and oily green leaves, letting the olives catch in the rake’s teeth and plop gently onto a tarp beneath the tree. “Just like combing your hair,” she said as she pulled her rake down through a tangle of branch and fruit.
We moved through the orchard tree by tree, combing, collecting. As we worked, I peppered my hosts with questions: What did extra virgin mean? Can you eat olives like grapes? (That second answer was no, but I tried to anyway. It was dense and bitter. I spat it out quickly.)
Our days followed a steady rhythm, working in the morning, breaking in the afternoon, dinner, card games, wine, repeat. I basked in the simple routine, gleefully ignored my phone, hiked the gypsum cliffs and gouged-out country road, and drank in the peace of night under familiar stars and the reliable churn of the windmills on the mountain’s crest.
We combed the hair of 27 olive trees in three days, and on the fourth day, Tony and I drove to a deafening warehouse where a Suess-like machine gobbled down our harvest—olives, pits, twigs. and all—churning it into a brown mash and spitting it out as an electric-green oil. With a hunk of day-old bread, I tasted it: peppery and still warm from the pressing.
Once the oil was pressed, it was time to prune the orchard. Olives pop off willingly, but pruning requires actual weapons, like chainsaws. Lyn and I snipped small, thin branches with pruning shears while Tony took to large limbs. The work was slow and sweaty. But as we progressed, my hosts handed me sharper, more serious tools, and trusted me to take out larger branches. I’d like to think it’s because they saw in me what I was beginning to feel: a growing sense of capability, and a willingness to take on new and challenging tasks, like mending chain link fence, cutting back a spiny pawpaw, or closing the chicken coop after the sun had set, which meant walking back through the olive grove in the inky mountain night.
On the morning I left Contrada Noce I sat on the veranda sipping espresso with Tony as wind and rain barreled in from the north. The storm rolled in the night before, and the howling wind had covered the sound of my soft sobs as I packed. Alone in my room, I cried because I was proud of myself for committing to this trip. I achieved so much of what I hoped for by learning about olive oil, by putting my body to use and my brain to rest. I cried because I did not want to leave Contrada Noce and the cozy life Tony and Lyn had welcomed me into. And, for the first time, I cried for the family that would never be the same, the family I was going home to.
Tony helped get my luggage to the car, which now contained a liter of olive oil and homemade marsala, and we made the journey down from the mountains to the sea, where I would catch the train to Palermo, a flight to Rome, spend a night, and then return home. We hugged goodbye at the train station, and I promised I’d be back.
I spent my one-night layover in Rome getting drunk and over-eating in a reckless bid to keep the day from dying. The next morning I confronted my sins directly under the accusatory lights of Fiumicino Airport, as I shuffled around the Duty Free shop looking for gifts.
I picked up packages of dried pasta and herbs, glanced at discounted booze, but nothing seemed quite right. My mind wandered as I floated through the shop. In a few hours I would be home, right back in the mess I had left. I thought ahead to the end of the year and beyond. How would we handle Christmas and birthdays? Who would keep the house? The dog? My parents’ split had been so sudden, the changes overwhelmed me. But when I thought about it, that didn’t seem much different from when I arrived in Sicily three weeks ago, thinking I could eat olives off the trees. I’d come alone to this place, adapted to a completely different way of life, learned to harvest olives, press them for oil, and meet change and challenges every day. So when I finally found the gift to bring home, bags of milk chocolate and hazelnut candies that actually looked quite good, I grabbed two of them—one for my mom, one for my dad—instead of the one I previously would have counted on them to share. It was my first, baby step into a new reality, and a reminder that I would learn to adapt and grow, just as I had in Contrada Noce.
