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.