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Friday Slide Show: Ancient Olives
22 September 2023
There is something contradictory about that headline. Olives as a food ought to be ripe but not ancient and yet olives as trees may certainly be ancient.
As we walked among them, though, we were not thinking about olives or trees. We were marveling at the site of those old twisted trunks, the bark frayed by the decades, and still some leafy growth showing signs of life.
It led us to think of the twists and turns life takes, the unexpected ones, some delightful and some dreadful. All of them dramatic.
This is the time of the week we hunt for a Saturday matinee, which means we scroll by dozens of wedding videos. They are always full of promise. Everyone dressed smartly at romantic venues decorated delightfully with fabulous food coming endlessly from the caterers arms.
But at a certain age we come to know that glimpse of life is fleeting. Life batters us with rain and whips us with wind and tries to shake the ground out from under our feet, burn up everything familiar or drown us in its deluge.
And we end up without that spouse at some nursing home struggling through some life-threatening diagnosis or dementia, eating institutional food and watching television.
That's what we were thinking as we revisited the olive trees of our first days on earth at Mountain Lake Park.
We'd returned to our old neighborhood six months after buying tires there. It was time for our free tire rotation and we never ever ever pass up free.
"Give us 45 minutes," the proprietor said. So we walked over to the park and took a few shots of some olives trees.
And thought about life.
How short it is. How it promises everything and then takes it all away.
Is there an emoji for that?
No, but there are some photographs. And now that you know what the photographer was thinking, do they strike you any differently?
