olivewood

Written by Cathoel Jorss, published 12 years ago

On the market I bought a tiny chopping block made from olive wood. It’s dense and silky and only a little larger than my spread hand. I was about to hand over the money when he said, Some of the trees are 500 years old! How is that a selling point? My eyes filled with tears. 500 years? Yet someone’s hacked it down to chop onions on?

The guy explained. When the tree stops fruiting. They plant a new tree. So the old one. Has to go. A few stalls later I bought a bottle of cloudy oil pressed from some other olive tree. In a furniture store in Adelaide my friend and I found foldable patio settings carved out of ‘plantation teak.’ Teak too takes hundreds of years to mature. I remember how bleakly we marvelled at it: What prescient person realized, half a millenium back, that one day we would need stands of teak? Why is there not a statue to this innovative forester on every town square and in every school?