Life In the Way

The first time I entered the apartment, I was on a reconnaissance mission. I was planning on buying a different unit in the same project, and was consulting neighbors about the air and the light in these apartments, all identical. Identical, but not the same. Rationally, I know that the décor of a home should not influence the purchase of a property. After all, the furnishings and fixtures go with the seller. Nevertheless, I was totally taken in by the Moroccan style. But it wasn’t the furniture that sealed my fate.

For once I stepped into the bright, spacious living room, I couldn’t miss it. Beyond the broad sliding doors leading to the yard, there it sits. Majestic and imposing, occupying an elevated corner of the garden and peering out at the breathtaking view of the Ayalon Valley in the distance. Back then, the bulldozers and construction cranes had not yet reached much of the untouched hills just across the street.

Back then, I knew next to nothing about olive trees, but even I could see that this tree – which I was told was more than 40 years old -- was particularly impressive. Six years have since passed. A new neighborhood complete with young gardens, and olive trees of its own, now stands on the once rocky hills, which had once been teeming with ancient archeological remains, delicate wildflowers in the winter, and the odd braying donkey or two. I still know next to nothing about olive trees.

But I know my tree, its thick, sturdy trunk which splits in two very close to the base, its full foliage, and its abundant fruit which weighs down the upper branches in the fall. I know that its branches and leaves extend nearly symmetrically around the trunk in a perfect circle, unlike many other olive trees which appear to grow on a diagonal axis – with the trunk on one side, and the branches growing off in a different direction. I know how the ground fills up with the unharvested black olives, which mix with the small, reddish volcanic rocks surrounding the tree, and scatter across the nearby grass and stone patio. Most of the fallen fruit are dry, shriveled, a dull black, surrounded by thin, long leaves which curl into themselves when they brown and dry. A few olives, the freshly fallen, are plump, shiny purple-black, eggplant-like. When trampled on (as often happens, given their proximity to ongoing baseball practices), their flesh bursts and tantalizingly glistens with juice – oil, really.

The downed olives create an implausible but irresistible temptation – and choking hazard– to my one-year-old. Olives straight from the tree are inedible and taste horrible, but that doesn’t stop Eliad from trying to stick them in his mouth over and over again. When he’s quicker than we are, he usually grasps the olive between his top and bottom front teeth, as I used to see old people nurse sugar cubes in between their incisors as they sipped tea. Maybe, to the baby, the raw olive tastes as good as sugar with tea. Or maybe he understands something we don’t.

Eliad was born during the olive harvest. In fact, his birth prevented us from curing our first batch of harvested olives, which we had collected shortly before Rosh Hashana. For the harvest, we enlisted the help of our friend Ben, an experienced olive-harvester, and our collective children, ranging in age from eight to two-and-a-half. We envisioned an exciting, perfect activity for the kids, engaging them in a hands-on nature project. But their interest quickly waned, and they wandered off to play ball, dress up, and, sadly, watch a video. Given my advanced stage of pregnancy, I sat out the harvest, and the two men collected the fruit, whacking the higher branches with an ice hockey stick and catching the bounty on a tarp spread across the ground.

Lawrence and I sorted the olives according to Ben’s instructions. Green (younger olives) in one container; black (more aged) in another; half-green, half-black, or purple, in a third. The rejects, those with bruises or bugs, were discarded. When we were finished, we entrusted the collection to Ben. With the baby on the way, we could not commit to the next time-consuming stage – cutting a slit in each olive and soaking them in special pickling jars. (I had saved up more than a dozen glass jars, mostly from tomato sauce and apple sauce, over the course of months. But Ben was skeptical that these would be up to the task. We did not have the air-tight pickling jars, and did not envision ourselves having the opportunity to get them, with both the birth and holidays around the corner.)

So the olives left with Ben, and his three kids in tow. Ben planned to pursue the several weeks-long process of soaking, changing the water repeatedly, flavoring, and soaking some more. And, at the end, we would get the fruit of his labor and our tree.

But for Ben, too, life – and death – got in the way of olive-curing. His grandmother’s death was quickly followed by his daughter’s birth and our olives rotted, indifferent to both birth and death.