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Adventures from Croatia: Supple Hands & Olive Bliss

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Adventures from Croatia: Supple Hands & Olive Bliss

We’ve been picking olives for two days, well, a day and a half. Rained out this morning, we traveled back to the fields at noon to pluck the green and purple delicacies. There’s no temptation to eat the harvest which is bitter to the taste, but the promise of bountiful olive oil awaits us at the end of our stay.

Each worker receives a liter of olive oil for a full day’s work. (I also learned that roofers get a case of beer for each day they work–I’m thinking olive oil goes with olive pickers more than beer with roofers, but I’m going to have to chalk that one up to cultural differences).Ā 

Picking olives isn’t rocket science, but the activity is precarious. Balancing in trees like an acrobat, climbing branches like a monkey, reaching for olives just beyond grasp fill our days. Yet I find the hands-on work delightful and rewarding. Clearing a single tree can take anywhere from two and a half to four hours depending on the fulness of the harvest as well as the amount of helping hands.

Speaking of hands, one of my biggest surprises is how supple and soft my hands are at the end of every day. While one might think hard, farming labor would lead to dried out, scratchy hands, picking olives leaves you with the sense you’re hands were just treated at a spa.

I express how good it feels to be out in the fields. Putting in a hard day’s labor. Recognizing that as hard as I work, our host’s 74-year-old mother who I’ve nicknamed “Mama” is working circles around me.

As I pick olives, massaging each branch to release it’s treasure, I’m reminded that what we have in our refrigerators and kitchen cabinets is not a right as much as it is a privilege, a gift, an opportunity and obligation to give thanks to God who gives us all good things….even the fruit of the fields.

*Photo courtesy of here

46 Comments

  1. Travis Mamone
    Travis Mamone on November 17, 2010 at 11:35 am

    I’m not a big fan of olives, but I love olive oil. There’s a pizzeria in my neighborhood that puts olive oil on their pizzas. Makes the pizza really greasy, but 10 times tastier!

    Now, you mentioned that this is for an upcoming book. Is it going to be like a sequel to “Scouting the Divine?”

  2. Margaret Feinberg
    Margaret Feinberg on November 17, 2010 at 11:56 am

    The next book will be completely different, Travis–this one will be different, but this is one of the things I felt was left undone from Scouting that I needed to do for me and my own understanding of Scripture.

  3. Marian
    Marian on November 17, 2010 at 12:52 pm

    So I am thinking that the next time I walk through Whole Foods, it’s going to be terribly hard to resist the urge to plunge my hands in the olive bar and cry…”For the sake of soft skin!” as they take me away and put my name on the black list.

    Oh, for Croatia…it may be hard to return.

  4. Margaret Feinberg
    Margaret Feinberg on November 17, 2010 at 1:06 pm

    Marian,

    Really, who ever said there was something bad about being on a black list????
    šŸ™‚
    M.

  5. Patrick
    Patrick on November 17, 2010 at 1:58 pm

    Looking forward to hearing your insights on Scripture from olive farming and how they all come together. Starting session 2 of our Scouting the Divine study tonight and really looking forward to it. A God-timed event.

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