Living Out of a Suitcase: Carry a Big Stick

My grandmothers are two of the toughest women I know. One is the finest lady I know and I’m sure could make a gangster feel ashamed of his profession. The other, in her 80s, makes her own cinder blocks and wakes up with the roosters. These are strong Portuguese women and I’m very proud to come from such strong stock.

But, there are just some things that an 84 year old women shouldn’t do. One of them is picking alfarroba. For those of you unaware of what an alfarroba is, don’t worry, it’s a Portuguese word. The English word for it is a carob tree. I’m not going to pretend I know what they are. I didn’t know there was an English equivalent and I still don’t know what is. All I knew was that they could be used in chocolate and that my grandmother picks them and then sells them.

Alfarroba's aka carob pods. The black kind play the starring role in this story.

That’s how it started. My mom’s mom has a house in the country. She spends her days in her garden tending to her flowers, plants and doing other upkeep. She also has a giant carob tree on her property. Lucky for us, our time in Portugal happened to coincide with the time of the year when alfarroba’s are ripe for picking. Not one to actually come out and ask for our help, my grandmother spent two days subtly (or not so subtly) hinting that she'd like us to help. We would ask her when she’d come to the beach with us. She’d sigh heavily, look out the window point at the carob tree and say she had so much work to do. Keep in mind that there is no real obligation to the tree—there is no law to pick the tree. But it was on her property and she wasn’t going to neglect it. So we made a deal: she would come stay with us for a few days and we (me, parents, my sister and brother-in-law, Steve) would devote our Saturday to picking this tree.

“It’ll take a morning, probably less with all of us helping,” my dad assured us, himself a veteran of the task.

We began early: up at 8am and after a wake up coffee for the oldies (Jen and Steve I’m talking to you) we were off. Our task was to get the alfarroba pods off the tree and collected in sacs. In some cases this was easy. Some had fallen off the tree and all we had to do was pick them off the ground.

Others were not so accessible. In order to get at them we resorted to different tactics. The first was to use giant sticks to smack at branches of the tree. This would send pods falling to the ground and usually hitting whoever was picking them up— in this case me—on the head (imagine raw lima beans smacking you in the head).

In order to get at the hard to reach branches, some of us would climb the trees to smack at the branches with our aforementioned big sticks. This was both a test of balance (standing on the branch) as well as coordination (using the stick to smack the branches).

But perhaps the most efficient way was Steve’s, “making it rain.” It involved Steve climbing the tree, going deep into the brush and with each hand holding a different branch and either jumping or shaking the branches. This would cause the pods to cascade to the ground in large numbers and “making it rain.” It proved quite successful as it maximized the amount of alfarobas and minimized the effort of everyone—except maybe Steve.

But it was not without its dangers. There were a few times when Steve neglected to tell us it was about to “rain” and those on the ground—me and Jen—where assailed with bean shaped missiles smacking us in the head from great heights and at greed speeds.

In the end, collecting all the alfarrobas took a full day. To amuse ourselves we sang out loud—Pretty Woman, Bon Jovi and others. By the end, we were exhausted, full of back pain and covered in battle scars.