Olives

what better way to start the year

Jan 06, 2023

It’s been a slow start to 2023 for me. Monday and Tuesday, I felt a bit under the weather, likely because I was finally letting down after two months which involved a lot of activity, travel, excitement, and tons of emotion.

It’s nice when our bodies hang in long enough to accomplish all that we need/wish. It’s commonly my experience that once my body has done the deed, if I’m foolish enough to consider proceeding full steam ahead (which at times I must admit I am), she shuts down and goes on strike. I can’t blame her.

This wasn’t a full-blown strike, thankfully. But I definitely got the message that it was time to rest for a few days, and I did both Monday and Tuesday. We planned to take down the tree on Wednesday and the lights outside on Thursday, and I hoped to write my Friday post about fire somewhere in that timeframe between rain showers.

Here I sit on Thursday night with the Christmas tree lights still shining bright. The needles are all over the floor, but the lights look great. The outside lights are also still lit this evening, the raindrops helping them to shimmer and the winds causing them to sway side to side as if dancing. My post about fire, while started, still needs to be completed.

What we did manage to get done was to take our first stab at curing olives. What?

Yep, you read that right. Rick went down last week to visit our buddies in Fresno and came home with two buckets of raw olives. Lalo and Rick picked them from a neighborhood city tree— there’s always an adventure when those two spend time together.

About five years ago, our garden mentor, Lalo, created 50 red Solo cups filled with olive tree seedlings for us. We had a hill we wanted to plant trees on. He literally collected the seedlings growing wild wherever he happened to find them. Of course, some didn’t make it, but we ended up with about 25 trees, which are just beginning to fruit as of last year.

Lalo thought it would be a good idea to start practicing how to cure olives, hence the two buckets of olives sitting in our garage. Yesterday as my energy began to return, we sat huddled on small stools next to Rick’s Christmas present this year, a new space heater (to the left just outside of the photo), sifting through the olives picking out the ones worth curing. And today, we continued the process. I’ll let you know how they turn out.

As I near the end of this first week of 2023, I think back to my Monday post, seeing that I took my words to heart…

appreciate my health in whatever form it takes

use my energy wisely

The lights and the tree could wait. The ripening olives couldn’t. And in the end, I had something fun to share in a post, albeit different than I had planned. Perhaps I need to add one more desire for 2023.