Old Yearnings

Having grown up in the northeast United States, I can tell you that the de rigueur autumn pre-school activity is a trip to the local pumpkin patch. Kids bundle into their warm, puffy coats to check out the pumpkins (sizes big to massive), enjoy a horse-drawn hayride, sip hot apple cider and, if they’re really lucky, devour a candied apple.

Somewhere along the way, I know I also visited, at least once, some type of colonial village in which we children learned how the early Americans churned milk into butter and spun wool into yarn some 200 years ago.

Here, in Israel, my daughter enjoyed the milder Mediterranean version of my mid-Atlantic childhood field trips. Instead of row after row of oversized pumpkins, there was a solitary modest-sized squash nestled next to the four basil plants. Instead of horses and hayrides over endless acres (or so it seemed at the time) of forest and farmland, there was one braying donkey, a disabled dog injured in a car accident, and short footpaths among the various crops and small, environmentally-friendly wood buildings. Instead of hot apple cider, there was hot tea brewed from verbena and geraniums.

Instead of churning milk into butter, we pressed olives into oil. Two at a time, the children circled the press, pushing the large wooden stick to rotate the millstone, crushing the olives. The press at this modern day ecological farm is remarkably similar to those in use thousands of years ago, during the time of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, such as those found in the very hills where my neighborhood now stands.

Our guide Tal placed the meaty, crushed pulp into socks, which served as the children’s strainers as they squeezed out the olive oil, their hands slick with their nearly finished product. Some delighted in the sensation. Others, less so.

Next to the press was an aged olive tree, gnarled and knotted, whose hollow trunk is still increasing in circumference. One of its many shoots, itself now six or seven years old, took hold within the hollow trunk, from which it grows, generating its own fruit which my daughter’s class harvested on a previous visit. The five-year-olds gathered around the old tree, a master in the art of perennial regeneration, and learned that olive trees in Israel can live for a thousand years.

In the medicinal herbs building, small hands clutched mortars and pestles, attempting to mimic our guide’s circular motion to pulverize rosemary. Tal placed the crushed rosemary into a small jar of olive oil, produced on the farm, to create a rosemary infusion.

In two weeks time, the children will mark the beginning of Chanukah, the festival of the miraculous oil which burned continuously eight days in the desecrated Temple. They will sing Chanukah songs in their kindergarten, just meters away from the site where a massive ancient olive press compound was uncovered. Conservationist Marion Stone wrote about the site in a local magazine: “Here olives were pressed for oil at a time when the Second Temple stood in Jerusalem, and because of the presence of a guardhouse and mikveh [ritual bath], it is thought that here the oil was produced, so pure that it would be fit for ritual use in the Temple. Experts even offered the theory that maybe the oil was used by the Maccabees to rededicate the Temple after their battles with the Seleucids.”

In their modern kindergarten building, the children will open the steeped olive oil-rosemary infusion to sample an age-old remedy to an ancient affliction that plagued me as a child: lice. Lice dislike the scent of rosemary. Tal taught us that in addition to its own moisturizing and restorative properties, olive oil is also endowed with the ability to assume the characteristics of fragrant and medicinal herbs.

When I got home, I had an overwhelming desire to view photographs of the pre-school version of myself surrounded by the oversized pumpkins. So I emailed my mother, who pored through the stacks of albums in her New Mexican den, to find the vintage image of me in my puffy coat and wind-whipped hair, surveying the orange bounty.

Somewhat dismayed, she reported back that the photographs did not age well, and had oranged. Not in the least bothered, I urged her to send them over. And I was not disappointed. The hooded four-year-old me, wearing plaid pants and my brother’s boyish hand-me-down coat, clutched a pumpkin to my face with my mittened hands. All around me was a massive pile of bright orange pumpkins. But it wasn’t just the pumpkins which were orange. Like the olive oil soaking up the rosemary’s properties, the ground absorbed the pumpkin’s orange hue.