Post-Election Reality: The Olive Harvest Is About To Begin

Well, it’s time to get my head out of the clouds and put my Nikes back on our stony Izzalini soil. The olive trees await us and as soon as we have a cold snap followed by dry weather we’ll be out there with our ground nets and our ladders.
2007 was one of our periodic "bad years” and we didn’t even bother to think about the harvest. Almost no one in our area had enough fruit to pick.
My particular trees were infested with fruit fly larva in 2007. The previous winter was particularly warm and the flies, not the trees, were fruitful and multiplied. I could have milled those olives and produced “olio grasso” (fatty oil), as the farmers in Southern Italy normally do, but I don’t care for the taste. It’s heavy, not at all peppery, and the addition of worm protein turns the oil rancid in no time at all.
The groves of some of my neighbors produced olives last year, but all the fruit shriveled up and dropped because we had no rain during the summer. We could have picked them up off the ground, but then what? They contained almost no raw oil.
The Umbrian zone to the west and south of Todi had a pretty good crop in 2007 and they immediately profited by raising the price of local oil by about 50%. Those of us with our own, normally productive trees refused to pay nine Euros (US $13.50) per liter and instead rationed our 2006 supply. Thrift and pride in equal measures.
La Casella’s trees aren’t exactly full of olives this fall, but there are more than enough to harvest and mill. I’ll report back on how it goes.

No Free Lunch

This past Sunday Izzalini hosted an all-day program in honor of a saint I'd never heard of -- undoubtedly a local luminary, although not from our locality. It turned out to be a Vatican touring show, complete with learned speakers and a dazzling red-and-white plastic tent for late-afternoon refreshments.
I can't say I noticed many extra cars parked in front of the church or an overflow crowd in the piazza after Mass. In fact, the folding plastic chairs outnumbered the audience members 4-1. And I noticed that the folks who attended the post-Mass lecture did not return for the post-lunchtime session. Others drifted in, mainly from our own parish, and the last to arrive were my Izzalini neighbors. That's because the food was last on the program.
What a feast they found in the red-and-white tent: stingy, dried-out roast pork sandwiches and plastic cups of wine, soda or bottled water. Well, most likely people found out about the event by word of mouth and nobody bothered to read the fine print in the announcement -- the line that read:
At 17.00 a snack will be served.
However, free food is free food, even if there was a donation box on the table. The cool part about the Euro is that coins go up to the equivalent of $3.00 and nobody can tell what you're dropping in.