Life in Greece, Part 13

Signs and Portents

When I was tired of crochet, having spent some hours doing it, I walked out onto our balcony, and there in the night sky was a sight wondrous to behold. I’d never seen anything like it before, or anything more beautiful. It looked like a tight cluster of maybe a dozen stars, closer to each other even than the Pleiades, and brighter, a twinkling cloud of little lights. It looked, actually, like a just-exploded, still tiny, shimmering firework, frozen in the sky.

I had no idea what it was. It was too small to be the moon, even a crescent moon, with something partly obscuring it. I never heard of a comet looking like that. It couldn’t be a UFO because it wasn’t flying; it was just staying where it was. It was not the sort of thing one associates with the End of the World. A supernova? No; it wouldn’t look like this. So what could it be? What could it mean? Every suggestion that came to my mind was ridiculous.

I suppose I stood there five full minutes, absorbed in silent wonder, before I noticed another, similar object, higher up in the sky. And then a third one.

And then I knew what this sign meant. It meant that for hours of close work, I need proper glasses! But not seeing clearly does have its advantages, and tonight’s vision was one of them.

Crochet – in Greece? You’ve Got to be Kidding!

And WHY, you ask, when I’m here in Greece, where there are umpteen thousand things to see and do, am I spending hours and hours doing, of all things, crochet? I could do that back in Richmond, for heaven’s sake!

It’s because of a very nasty chest cold that has left me voiceless and sleepless and energy-less. Demetrios has since caught it, too.

The good part is, it has deprived us both of appetites. Not that lack of appetite ever stopped me eating, but at the moment there’s nothing in the house unhealthy enough to be tempting. So I’m only eating because I know I should.

The other good part about having no appetite is, I don’t feel like cooking anyway – or going out to eat, either. Or shopping for groceries.

We’re just staying in bed as much as we can, separate beds, too, so when one can’t sleep the other can.

I seem to be recovering, slowly. Demetrios’ cold is about 24 hours behind mine, so he should begin to feel noticeably better by tomorrow.

Christos (my brother-in-law) had it a couple of days before we did and he’s fine now.

Memory: I can remember when Demetrios became sick for the very first time in his life. Feeling bad was astonishing for him! He couldn’t stop expressing his amazement. It has got to have been healthy for him, though, to experience illness from the other side of the stethoscope.