AUTIGNAC, FRANCE -- If figs look like foreign interlopers in this dry place, dusty green olive trees, with their voluptuous fruit and dark tropical greenery, look right at home.
Which, of course, they are. One proposed definition of the limits of the Mediterranean region is simply "where olives grow."
But beyond aesthetic or geographical correctness, there is something almost symbolically fitting about olive trees that yield the luxuriance of olive oil from pitted, hard and bitter fruit in a parched and stony place that nevertheless finds a way to produce wine, figs and pomegranates,
As we walk or drive through the countryside here, any number of visual cues -- from vineyards, to red tiled roofs to the local scrubland called garrigue -- make it clear that we are no longer in Minnesota. But nothing quite says "Welcome to the Mediterranean" like watching a sage-colored olive grove slide past the driver's side window, or walking up to the knuckled gray trunk of a solitary olive tree on the shoulder of a dusty side road.
It was in the shade of one such venerable loner that we found ourselves this morning -- the only tree in sight other than a shaggy almond growing above a drainage ditch a football field away.
Beneath the tree stood a ladder and our neighbor Jean-Luc's pants. The rest of him was somewhere up among silvery foliage. He made muffled sounds of greeting before climbing down and unbelting his improvised collection basket, fashioned from the bottom half of a plastic tub (which previously had contained, if I interpreted what was left of the label correctly, a commercial herbicide).
With the courtesy of every dirty-handed worker we've encountered here, he offered his elbow to shake: "Salut, Steve." And then the obligatory double kiss for Mary Jo, while I did the same with Nicole, his wife, who was returning from their truck with an empty bucket.
Nicole set her bucket on the ground. Jean-Luc poured a thudding stream of fat green olives into it, then tied his belt back on, and we were off to work.
