Last year, when olive season came around, I made a quiet but firm decision to stay out of it.
Not in a dramatic way. Just in the way you decide not to touch a hot pan again after you’ve touched a hot pan.
I had tried to help. I had been given a ladder. I had put the ladder in the wrong place. I had been politely but unmistakably moved out of the way by three different men and one woman in a headscarf who looked about ninety but carried two full crates without blinking. By the end of that day, I’d contributed approximately half an olive and quite a lot of advice nobody wanted.
So this year, when the talk started again in the bar, I said nothing. I drank my coffee. I nodded in what I hoped was a local, knowing way.
And then Carmen said, “We should help.”
She said it the way she says most things. As if it’s already decided and we’re just catching up.
“You,” I said, “are Spanish. You have olive DNA. I am a liability.”
She smiled and said, “You’ll be fine. And if not, you’ll be entertaining.”
Which is not the same thing.
The night before, she laid out old clothes for both of us like we were going on a school trip. Thick socks. Stuff that could get ruined. A hat for me, because apparently my head is “optimistic” about the sun.
In the morning, we walked up through the terraces while the light was still doing that soft thing it does here, before it turns serious. The hills were quiet, apart from the odd shout carrying across from another plot and the sound of metal tools being unloaded somewhere below us.
Paco was already there, of course. Paco is always already there. I think he might sleep under an olive tree.
He looked at me, looked at Carmen, and handed me a rake.
Not a ladder. A rake.
Progress.
The system, as far as I can tell, is simple and complicated at the same time. Sheets go under the trees. People hit the branches with sticks or use little vibrating things that look like something you’d buy in a shop that doesn’t exist in the village. Olives fall. You collect them. You try not to fall.
Carmen disappeared into the work immediately. She moved differently to me. More… naturally. Like she’d done this in another life, or at least watched enough people do it to know where not to stand.
I, meanwhile, spent the first twenty minutes enthusiastically raking nothing in particular.
At one point Paco came over, gently took the rake from me, moved me two metres to the left, and gave it back. No words. Just a small nod. Like repositioning a piece of furniture.
Still, something strange happened after a while. I stopped thinking about whether I was in the way. I started to notice the rhythm of it. The sound of olives hitting the sheets. The way people worked in short bursts, then paused. The quiet conversations drifting around the trees.
At one point Carmen came over with a bottle of water and wiped my forehead with her sleeve.
“You look like you’re fighting the mountain,” she said.
“I think the mountain is winning,” I said.
She laughed, kissed my cheek, and went back to work.
We ate lunch sitting on upturned crates. Bread, tortilla, something pickled that nobody could quite name. Someone poured wine into plastic cups even though it was barely midday. Nobody questioned it.
I realised, somewhere between the second and third bite, that nobody had told me to stop. Or moved me. Or taken a tool out of my hands.
I wasn’t useful, exactly. But I was… allowed.
On the walk back, Carmen took my arm. We were both dusty. Tired in that good, honest way. The kind that makes you quiet.
“You did well,” she said.
“I raked heroically,” I said.
She squeezed my arm. “You showed up.”
That, I think, is the real work here. Not the olives. Not the ladders or the sheets or the crates.
Just showing up. Again. And again. And again. Until one day, nobody is surprised that you’re there.