Saturday, September 29, 2007

When you join Leonidas and Ianna, you’ve joined the Battle of the Sexes! Well, you do not join, of course; as a guest, you keep your mouth shut while they play this game of provoking one another quite deliberately.

In the morning, Ianna asked Leonidas to buy some bread while he and Demetrios were out on their excursion about town. No. He could not do that.

So about eleven o’clock, when I had finished breakfast (!) Ianna and I went out for an excursion of our own. We bought the bread and some other items. Then Ianna wanted to take a table by the beach for a while and have something cold to drink. She had a frappe; I had an “orange”, which means slightly carbonated orange soda. We sat under the palm trees and watched the swimmers in the sea. You can go out 50 meters and the water is still only up to your knees. You have to go out another 25 meters before it is up to your waist. That and the absence of waves makes it ideal for small children. Ianna said she likes it when the water is smooth like that. I said so do I, but very rough, Atlantic waves are also great fun, waves that are just slightly dangerous!

“We will sit here a little longer,” said Ianna. “Of course, that will make the dinner late.” She smiled, and I realized why we were taking our time. Yes, of course, having to buy the bread takes time away from cooking the moussaka – a lot of time! So we leaned back and spent another half hour or so enjoying the perfect weather.

I used to be a feminist. I renounced that when I became Orthodox. Mena is a loud feminist. Ianna is a quiet one. And I, over this Labor Day weekend, finally decided I cannot entirely renounce it myself, either. One thing that has become perfectly clear to me is this: a woman must never, ever, leave herself completely at the mercy of any man! She must always have the option of independence, of self-sufficiency, even if she has no intention of ever using it. You just never know when the necessity of exercising the option may take you suddenly and unawares.

The little town of Stavros, Ianna told me, has had a hard go of it since last we were here. The summer weather was so hot, Ianna said, that Leonidas’ tomatoes were “few and bad.” The temperature was as hot as 110 (Fahrenheit) even at 10:00 p.m. for several days in a row. Ianna kept her little air conditioner going, but it only cooled the house to about 93.

But worse than the summer had been the autumn before. Last October a catastrophe occurred. There was a huge downpour in October, for about an hour and a half. The townspeople began hearing a strange noise in the mountains, like a buzzing or a rumbling. Nobody knew what it was.

Now I don’t know about you, but if I were to hear unexplained rumblings in the mountains like nothing I’d ever heard before, I would get in my car and get out of there, as fast and as far as I could! I would think volcano, earthquake, and tsunami, in approximately that order, and I would not pause to pack a suitcase, either. (Dilemma: do you head for the mountains or away from them, viz., toward the sea? I suppose you just go between them until you get as far away as you can – keeping a careful eye all the while on both!)

The villagers didn’t have long to wait before discovering what the sound was: an avalanche. More precisely, not anything involving snow, but mud and boulders; a mudslide, in short. Most of the town, within a few minutes, was two feet deep in mud and boulders. These were not boulders such as you could throw, mind you, but such as your family could climb and have a picnic on top of! They had to use bulldozers to clear most of it away, but what was left for us to see was certainly awesome. It looked to me as if a whole side of some mountain must have broken away and slid right down on the town.

They have “canals” of course, for the normal rainwater that washes down from the mountains to the sea, but these had quickly been blocked and had overflowed.

We wandered back to the house and got there at about the same time as the men. They had been to the site of another summer camp they had attended sometimes. It is on land Leonidas’ father had donated to a parish in Thessaloniki for the purpose.

We had the better part of an hour to wait while the moussaka baked; we all spent it on the balcony, just taking in the peaceful surroundings. We watched butterflies visiting the flowers in the sunshine, and I thought how close to Paradise is that! Did you know that for all his erratic flight, a butterfly can navigate through a chain-link fence without ever touching it? Leonidas said it reminded him of schools of fish he had seen on television, who all move together, turning this way and that in precision, like synchronized water ballet, “and none of them ever bumps into another.” Such was our talk, wondering at this beautiful world.

The moussaka dinner, with Greek salad and crusty bread and sweets afterward, was a huge success. We finished it sometime between 3:30 and 4:00 and followed it up with naps. HINT: While in Greece, always take your siesta! No cheating! You will need your rest to sustain you through the long evening.

We were all awake by about 7:00 in the evening.

The first stop on our excursion was to visit Eleutheria (Freedom), another sister of Leonidas’. She had recently acquired a tiny puppy, half Maltese, named Rita. Of course I was ecstatic. Wriggly, squirmy, 10-week-old Rita took turns playing in my lap and Leonidas’, while Eleutheria consulted Demetrios about the pains in her back and legs.

Ianna and I sat out on the balcony for a while, thinking it might be best to give the doctor and patient some privacy. A young man on a bicycle came by and seeing us, stopped to chat. Turns out he was Eleutheria’s grandson, so Leonidas’ great nephew. A daughter of hers, Katerina, also stopped by.

When our visit with Eleutheria and Rita was over, we went exploring the town by foot, taking little back alleys between overhanging balconies with wrought-iron balustrades, filled with plants and flowers.

We passed a little butcher shop, and Demetrios greeted the butcher warmly and commented that last time we were here, we had bought some of his sausage, and it was the best of its kind, said Demetrios, in the whole world! You can’t, of course, make such a remark as that and get away without buying some more. So he did.

We also encountered a third sister of Leonidas’, Bebe (whose real name is Soteria) and her husband, George. They were eating with their friends in an outdoor café and hailed us as we walked by. Bebe and George live right next door.

We passed by Soula’s house, too. She ran out and handed Leonidas a bag of koliva. That’s boiled wheat mixed with a lot of confectioner’s sugar, with raisins and parsley and spices. Wheat symbolizes Christ's saying about how unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground, it cannot grow. Koliva is prepared in honor of a deceased person on the anniversary of his or her death. (That can mean an annual anniversary, or the 1-month mark, or the 40th day mark, the six-month anniversary, whatever. In this case, it was for some distant relative.) She said she had company right now, so we promised again to come Sunday, tomorrow.

Leonidas wanted to have crepes for supper, so we stopped by a little sidewalk stand with a large griddle where we ordered them. Everybody but me had such things as ham, onions, mushrooms, and cheese in theirs. I had chocolate filling and lemon crème in mine!

Nobody told me whether this place was operated by another cousin or niece or nephew of Leonidas’, but it probably was. He was one of 12 children (15 originally, but 3 died in childhood) so you can’t go anywhere in this village without meeting someone who is his relative, if only by marriage.

We walked a bit more, admiring the sea and the fishing boats (still idle in port) and the dark mountains behind us, and the big, bright stars.

Then home, to relax on the balcony some more until bedtime. The cat family came around again; Leonidas fed them some small fishes he had. I don’t know whether he had bought them specifically for the purpose, but wouldn’t doubt it. Two of the feline friends condescended to stay there on the balcony with us for the duration.

I wish I could take them all home! Not as if there weren’t cats in America that needed homes. And not as if we didn’t already have two. But I worry. Where will the mother cat go to have her kittens? The weather will be quite cool by then…

The Discotheque Bora-Bora, which used to be almost next door, has closed, thanks be to God. It rather spoiled the rustic, peaceful atmosphere. Ianna says that once the club closed, the owners used the same land to raise small, white donkeys to sell. I asked who would buy one; she didn’t know. But they used to smell quite bad, she said, especially at night. However, the donkeys, too, are gone. All we could smell this night was the strong, sweet fragrance of forget-me-not, blooming in a pot just below the balcony. We did not discuss any heavy topics; no theology, very little politics.

This time I was the first to bed, but not by more than a few minutes.

The photograph is of Stavros from the air. That's the wharf, sticking out into the sea.