Russian Olives

and an Italian foraging vest

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”

―Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

Black olive, plum skins, wild grape and turmeric stains

If you take the northern route out of Los Angeles through the high desert to Death Valley to find wild borax stopping first in Rainbow Basin where no one stops you from collecting rocks or testing chalk and harvesting salt and you’ll have to meet the drone operator somewhere at a gas station near Barstow he just got back from shooting National Geographic’s “Shark Week” and has really healthy looking hair and skin and a plastic suitcase full of tech and can take his drone up so high that whole scene below might as well be inktest with its colours and rivulets, granulations and crinkling of colour. And after that it gets cactus-y and there is only one town left with a grocery store which you will need if you want decent wine and pasta and salad and other stuff for dinner in the airstream trailer beside the stand of mesquite trees with the glittery brown sap that might be a binder or might just turn to dust in a ziplock bag. I might be mixing the order up. But the last grocery store on the road to Death Valley is in a big parking lot and its attached to a giant pharmacy and its really really bright inside and you might as well be in any new mall anywhere in America except that on a little concrete island in the middle the parking lot silhouetted in the slow bluing dusk I see a cluster of purple brown berries on a silvery green parking lot shrub and I pick them and they are sticky and rich and almost eggplant coloured and I draw a perfect almost eggplant coloured line on the back of my hand and I look at the two toned silver and grey green leaves thin and familiar and I think this must be some kind of tiny, wild parking lot olive. And I wonder about it.

I wonder enough that when my friend Claudia sends me picture of some tiny berries on a tree in some crazy wilderness near the airport as part of some secret theatrical happening I know that I am seeing some concrete-loving weedy sister olive to the Californian ones. I wonder enough that I am willing to wait for my special foraging vest dyed with olive leaves and branches and that comes to me through such a complicated set of happenstances from Rome and I wear it out there in the magical spot with the Russian olive trees and the airplanes and the mosquitos and the river coming out of a culvert and the wild pear I ate and my whole family hopped the fence and the dog squeezed under and we were almost on a runway and I wore the vest and I found the Russian olives but they were not yet ripe. So we shared a baguette and fine cheese and a half-sized bottle of fine french wine and I turned 50 and the sky turned every colour and then blue and then black and only the airplane lights where left.

Special thanks to @jessicacimo and @brendanouel who got the vest to me. I didn’t get to properly thank them because my dog was confused by visitors and it was a confusing day.

See more of this beautiful work of Lucrezia Moro and her company Bilulu here

Please do consider becoming a paying member. This week paying members get to read the weird DM’s that lead to my foraging vest.