We woke before light, as we always do in October. The air had turned overnight — that particular sharpness that tells the trees the harvest is near.
We woke before light, as we always do in October. The air had turned overnight — that particular sharpness that carries no name in any language, but which every Avdelero farmer recognises in the bones before their mind is fully awake. The trees knew. You could see it in the way they held themselves, the branches very still, as though listening.
By the time we reached the grove the sky was the colour of old silver. My father walked ahead, as he always does, touching a branch here and there with the back of his hand. Not checking anything, exactly. More the way you might rest a hand on the shoulder of a friend you haven’t seen in some months. A greeting. A reckoning.
The olives were still a deep, electric green — the colour we wait for all year, the colour that means the polyphenols are at their height and the oil will carry that long, clean pepper finish that has become the mark of this harvest. We could have waited another week. But the cold had come, and the cold does not wait, and neither do we.
By afternoon, the first loads were already on their way to the mill. Four hours and forty minutes from branch to press. The oil that came out was vivid, almost aggressive — grassy and green and alive. We tasted it standing around the press in silence, the way you might stand around something sacred. Because it is.