Home for the Harvest

Lebanon Map Jiddi taught my father, his eldest son, how to care for the trees as lovingly as if they were family. They referred to the groves as the rizzi’ , a Lebanese word that roughly translates as “blessing.” Jiddi passed away before I was born, but the trees were handed down to my father and his siblings. For years, I would determinedly blow on every dandelion I encountered, hoping that one of the thousands of seeds I scattered would carry my wish back home.

A decade later, in 1994, we returned, but to a bombed-out house and a grove overgrown with thorn bushes. In just one year, the trees became rejuvenated, their regrowth robust, and come October, branches were weighed down by an abundance of fruit so heavy the leaves brushed the ground.

Our work was slower than that of our neighbors; we picked each olive by hand while they would use bamboo sticks to strike the branches. My father would repeat Jiddi’s words: “Would you hit someone who feeds you?” Hills Surrounding Olive Grove As the days went by, I started to toughen and complain less.

I especially loved sifting through thousands of green olives to find the plumpest and prettiest ones to give to my mother to brine for the year’s supply. It became a ritual for my siblings and me to go to the press with our father on the first day of the crop.

Our fruit would be washed and crushed, then out would gush the olive oil in a cloudy brilliance of golden green, opaque and unfiltered. My father and I took the olives from the first day of picking to press them.

My father folded the crackling just-baked sheets, dipping the hot shards into the olive oil and handing them to me. The next October, and the many that followed, I would call my parents from Australia, wanting to hear every little detail: “Which part of the rizzi’ is being harvested first?

I would smell the stone my mother used to crush the olives for brining, and I would see her face; I would withdrawal my father’s suntanned skin and his car filled with hessian bags bursting with olives. I had to be there. “What shall I cook for you?” That was my mother’s first question when I briefed her she should expect me there for my first harvest in 13 years.

Those helping us with the crop were living in an unfinished building close to our home. They worked carefully, picking the fruit as they exchanged stories from the tops of the trees.

Their situation was similar to the one that my family had endured nearly two decades earlier, but to me, now, their plight seemed worse and their future more uncertain. To my father and mother, their family was a sight as perfect as a fully formed dandelion seed pod.

But their hope, I knew, was that the winds might turn and the seeds come to land in a fertile olive grove right down the road.