The Olive Orchard
The first time I became aware of those trees, of their influence on me, I was with my mother. We walked through orchards that had been clinging to that rocky hillside for nine centuries. At certain times of day I can taste the air there, a haze that coats my tongue with a filmy, bitter green. I was showing her the country I had chosen to call home; vacant and distracted by the churning feeling inside me – the sinking knowledge that I was falling in love with a boy who would surely shatter me.
The second time, ten years later, I was with you, who delighted me with a thirst for that place that ran as deep as my own. Newly married, in love, yet reeling from the gravity of our choices. I was harboring the secret that the boy who shattered me had just resurfaced, (“finally ready...”), to shake the foundation I had built. I reached for the gnarled tree trunks to steady myself and wondered – how many generations of women had tried this before me?
Those trees. With their twisted skin and bitter fruit, their leaves are a school of tiny silver fish – a million solar panels tilting to the sun, drinking its endless light. They do not care who rules them, which empire takes the island, which dictator falls, the rise of the Mafia – and, now, the boats laden with refugees desperate to reach this rock rising out of the Mediterranean, their broken rafts washing ashore. Hope in the form of knotted twine and styrofoam. These trees certainly do not care about our human hearts, about my mistakes, or yours. They exist on a timeline that renders us mayflies, indifferent to our human dramas. Their job is simply to grow, to hold tight, to be the anchor that holds life to land.
The third time I was with our daughter. She, leaping and scrambling between the old trees while I sat in the dry earth overflowing; holding back tears, reckoning with the incomprehensible passage of time. The question of a second child hovering inside me like an anxious seed. And you are reading nearby. Yes, we’ve come this far together – this is our triumph. The following day, I fell in that orchard while walking alone. Stepped backward and tumbled down a hill until I lay on my back, unconscious, on the dusty path. I woke and lay there for a long time, my ankle throbbing, observing the humming stillness – the complete absence of change or reaction around me. Ants feasted on ripe caper berries beside me; a single olive fell to the ground. Nothing even blinked.
Four years later and a pandemic older, I return. More in love than ever, this time with our son. He scoops dead bees from the dust with his tractor, wakes me with kisses and then rages when I smear sunscreen over his golden head. After long days of relentless heat, I watch him fall asleep in my arms, surrendering to gravity and the roar of cicadas. Entwined with his sister, together they become an octopus wrapped around me– all suctions activated. Then you join us. Your body tastes of sea salt, sweat, and mosquito repellant. Every tan crease of your furrowed brow is mine. There are channels like this in the orchard too, eroded by summer rains. They reveal that beneath the surface this earth is littered with shards of painted tiles. Centuries of shattered facades churned through the roots of lemon and olive trees. Everything lost is still here, just splintered into smaller and smaller particles. We collect them; our daughter fits the pieces back together and makes me guess – “broken or fixed”?
Every ruin comes down to a story of someone’s desire.
A friend once gave me the image of an eclipse and said “nothing goes away, but other things become more important.” I envision us now, my sleeping family preserved like the embracing bodies of Pompeii. They were not solid, like we imagine them, but empty cavities left beneath ash and earth; human shaped voids that were filled with plaster to turn negative space into positive. My broad thighs encircle your hips, your arms criss-crossing mine and their thin limbs caught between us. We are a network of intersecting tunnels. Together, our four bodies form one sailor’s knot of open space.
While I write this, the growing edge of a brush fire breaches the hilltop across the valley. The damp snake of my braid slides down my spine as I straighten. How can all this coexist? How many women have lived this before me? How many will after?
This essay and these images (along with many more) appear in the artist book The Olive Orchard, released in 2022. View all books here.