The Silver Season

Autumn in Rural Greece

Back in our old lives in the U.S. Pacific Northwest the falling gold and ruby-colored leaves marked the autumn season. Nowadays, halfway around the world the seasonal shift in our expat world is marked by shades of silver.

Most notably the silver-hued olive groves amongst which we live in rural Greece.

The shimmering silver announces autumn’s arrival as well as that of the much-needed rainfall it brings with it. Greece, known for its gorgeous Mediterranean sun, has in recent years experienced unusually long, hot, dry summers in which that gorgeous sun has dried the earth and withered all things growing in it. Olives, shriveled from the harsh summer weather, experience a rebirth when the autumn winds blow in rainstorms. The fruit begins to plump as the trees’ dark green leaves flip themselves over, their undersides catching raindrops and revealing a distinct silver hue.

Autumn’s silver season is often reflected in both the sea and sky as well as the acres of olive groves.

The rain-plumped Koroneiki olives - the best for oil — are beaten, shaken and raked from the branches by harvesters. While hand-held tools have become mechanized the harvest techniques remain labor intensive, varying little from that done in decades past.

Local olive presses running late into the night are churning out the rich, emerald-colored oil, for which our area, Kalamata, is famous.

A decade ago, when we purchased our home on a hillside in Greece’s rural Peloponnese, we became olive growers. The Stone House on the Hill, as our home is called, was built on a 17-tree olive grove. What we knew about olive cultivation at the time could have fit into one of those raindrops pictured above.

We know a lot more than we did but still consider ourselves novices. For that reason, we hire those who are skilled in the pruning and harvest to direct us and those of our friends who volunteer to help with the autumn harvest.

Harvest in our area, which is known as the Mani, in the southwestern Peloponnese, begins in mid- to late- October. As olives ripen at higher elevations, the harvest operations move to higher groves that seem to hang from the hillsides of the Taygetos Mountain range. By late December, sometimes early January, harvests are completed for another year.

We’ve come to think of the olive groves as announcing the seasonal changes in our adopted world. Winter’s groves are stark - the trees pruned back to skeletons as part of the harvest process. Spring wildflowers appear in February carpeting the groves with a patchwork of primary colors, yellow, red, purple, blue and white. By the end of June cicadas fill the groves with what I call their symphonic song of summer. Blooms have withered; groves have been trimmed to prevent fire danger leaving the earthtones of barren soil and rocky terrain.

When we began our expat adventure it was because we wanted to experience the Mediterranean lifestyle. Visiting Greece for a matter of weeks simply didn’t seem enough. We wanted to spend a season, perhaps many seasons.

Amazingly the seasons have slipped past with what feels like increasing speed with each passing year. We’ve had a base in Greece for nearly a dozen years now!

Olive harvest and other expat experiences have been topics on our blog, TravelnWrite, ever since we embarked on this adventure. Many of our readers have asked for more tales. There are certainly many to tell, but we don’t want to wear out our welcome in the inboxes of our subscribers. So, I’ve hopped on the Substack bandwagon and will be writing stories here that differ from those on the blog.

Just like TravelnWrite, access to my articles on Substack is free of charge and so are the so called ‘subscriptions’ (signing up to receive the articles in your inboxes). Simply fill in your email address and receive these pieces when they are published. The blog can be accessed by clicking the link above and here my work is found at Jackie Humphries Smith.

Wherever you choose to spend time with us - know that we do appreciate it!