There is a little delay in my “around here” this week, since I just got back from a long weekend in Italy! It’s olive-picking time, and my family’s estate cabin has an olive grove that warrants a yearly small gathering of people willing to rake olives out of the trees. It happens with a net underneath, and little rakes on sticks that you use to comb the branches of olives so they fall into the net. Then you gather the net and dump the fruits into baskets, which you finally take to an olive pressing place, that presses the oils out of the pits and gives you jugs of peppery green olive oil. And then you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor! Good fun, and good work.
We were lucky to have some really lovely weather while we were there, as you can see from my bare-armed (wool!) olive picking-outfit. That’s my dad in the background, for a contemporary and alternative spin on American Gothic. Other activities included knitting of course, fires in fireplaces in the cool evenings, and loads of cheese and bread and wine. And now we’re back to the daily life, which for me includes hopefully soon finishing that dress I was cutting and prepping last week.