Halikonides? Maybe.

Never being one to rest on her laurels (or lavender fronds come to that), G, having "done" oil distilling, is now out in the fields on every fine day, and we have had a couple these last days, pruning the remaining unpruned plants in Lav1. Swift and svelte she squats on a small stool. In her grey and black machine knit hat and her bright red windcheater, her sunglasses seemingly incongruous, she crouches forward over each plant selecting and trimming to particular growth points before decisively snipping with her secateurs, trimming and shaping at the same time. She turns each pant into a perfect little football looking grey green ball among the oxalis and clover carpet surrounding it.

The Farmboy twins by contrast lumber around the olive grove like bears just woken prematurely for their hibernation. Farmboy himself drags a huge bag that once contained plaster or sand or some other granular building material in bulk and that now fills and empties regularly with olive prunings discarded and abandoned after the live harvest. A bonfire pile at the bottom of the field down by the river, now in flow, grows hourly. Eddie stumbles about gathering, snapping, stripping and tossing. Gathering the discards together into piles. Stripping ungainly protruberant twigs that will not fit the bag without problem. Folding and breaking the handull size bunches in half before tossing them into his brother's builder's bag. Using his arms and knees all the olive detritus begins to disappear into the maw of this gaping grab before Farmboy trundles off again heading riverward, to unload again, to trudge back up the incline again, step after laborious step.

The air remains cool but the sun shines brightly. There is no wind, not even a breeze. Only tiny, whispy, threads of pure white cloud streak the perfect blue sky above them. We love work, Shaun and I, we could sit in the warmth of the cellar all day watching it!