The dog, the small curly-haired one who doesn't look as fierce as he is, barks to announce my arrival. Catherine is there, and Bernhard, the young German, and Manuel. Manuel is 73. Lines carve out his jaw and mouth and deep-set eyes, filmy with cataracts. His clippers are going full speed, a great claw squeaking as the dull blades clutch a branch and pull, strip it of olives, the fruit falling green-purple-black in soft drumbeats on the net below.

Since he was 8 years old he's been picking olives. He tells me, "I was even born under an olive tree."

"Is that true, Manuel?" comes Catherine's voice from behind a leafy branch.

"Well, no," he replies, and we laugh. "But almost -- in a farmhouse near an olive grove."

Catherine is a Pennsylvanian who is tall and stands perfectly straight, long auburn hair flowing down her back. I have seen her walk for miles uphill and even then her back is straight. On one of those walks she showed me the rosemary that grows wild near the side of the road in this part of Spain. "She who passes by rosemary and doesn't pick it," she said, reciting a village proverb, "neither has love nor dreams of it." I watched her pick some, bring the pungent leaves to her nose and drop them in her pocket.

Catherine divorced her husband and came to live in the village near this grove a year ago, after having visited every summer for 20 years. She came to the village, she says, because it is where she feels most at home in the world.

She has had her disappointments. When she first came here she fell in love with a man from a neighboring village. Like many Spanish bachelors, he had lived at home with his mother all his life, but even after she died he could not bring himself to stay with Catherine, of whom his mother had disapproved because of her divorce and her foreignness.

But Catherine has her home in the village, her walls and tables draped in richly woven textiles, colorful clay pots and plates in the cupboards. She has her friendship with Manuel and other villagers who have come to love her.

And she has her olives.

This is Catherine's first time collecting the olives of her trees. Harvesting comes once a year, late fall, and lasts a little over a month. Today at twilight she will take the sacks we have filled to the molina in town that you can hear grinding away when the winds blow a certain direction, even from up here in the hills, making oil from the villagers' olives.

Clip, slide, snap, whoosh -- we skin olives from branches and they tumble to the ground like rain.

The sun gets hot and bright in southern Spain, even now in late fall. But the breezes from the Mediterranean are refreshing, and dry the sweat beading on my forehead before it can trickle down my face. Bernhard and Manuel use the two pairs of clippers, so Catherine and I use our hands, better for feeling the round bubbles of meat, smooth and taut, as we gently clasp the branches and pull through silvery-green leaves.

This is a much-needed respite from days at my writing desk in the small house I'm renting in the village. I like the feeling of community that comes of encircling this tree with the others, each with our own group of branches to clear but still working in tandem, accompanying each other with fragments of conversation and the whoosh-whoosh of falling olives.

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