Bibliographic 2.9: Greek Interlude
I’m in Greece for two weeks, except now there are just a few days remaining. The last time I was here was in 2018 and everything was different. Clara was 4 years old. Then the pandemic happened, life happened, and when we landed in Athens last week , just me and Clara, I realized I didn’t have any real plans for this particular trip. No itinerary. My only goal was for us to make it to the small island where we have a family home without catching Covid on the plane/bus/ferry over.
Clara’s most vivid memory from the last trip is of watermelon shaped popsicles, which I don’t think we can buy in Toronto. She even remembers the store we bought them from. We return to the store on our first morning and proceed to buy daily watermelon popsicles, one euro each. Clara recognizes that the pleasure is derived not just from its flavours, which aren’t entirely unique, but from the shape of the popsicle itself. “I don’t know why, but it just tastes better when it’s shaped like a triangle,” she says when she’s on her third popsicle of the trip.
It’s nice being here. I missed how beautiful the island is, how easy it is to walk around, wander from beach to beach. The simple exhaustion from being in saltwater all day. I forgot how time gets funny here, though. I feel 16 years old, 30 years old, 12 years old, old enough to be the mother of a 7 year old, too old to change the course of the rest of my life, young enough to start all over. It depends on the hour of the day. “How old were you when you were a kid?” Clara asks after I keep pointing out things I did in Greece when I was younger. That’s a tough question to answer, I say.
The two of us are together for the entire trip and maybe at home two weeks of being the primary parent with no childcare would feel… hard… but here we have a groove going, we are a little team, we’re joined at the hip.
This is what Clara wants on vacation: to go to the beach and spend the entire time in the water. A can of lemon iced tea. Chips. A gigantic pineapple shaped floatie and then to be pushed off it repeatedly in the water. A toasted sandwich made with Nutella for lunch. The charger for her tablet. For you to not eat all the fish at dinner so she can feed the leftovers to the feral cats that hang out in their specific corners of the island.
This is what I want on vacation: stillness. To be able to read multiple books in a row. A few big meals where we order too much for the table but eat it all and then get served a big plate of watermelon for dessert. Some wifi, but not too much. To float on my back in the clear blue water occasionally. To daydream a little and not check work email. To catch up on four years of gossip with my cousin. Some figs.
We get all of these things; we’re lucky.
Every so often there’s a tweet that goes viral about how as part of the fig pollination cycle, a female wasp must crawl inside the fig and then die. This means that when you eat a fig you’re also eating that desiccated wasp. I’ve spoken frequently about my love of figs over the years so people like to share this tweet with me whenever it makes the rounds. At home in Toronto the fact is amusing but the figs I buy from the grocery store don’t look like they come from wasps. I think of the tweet when I’m in Greece because in August figs are everywhere, getting ripe and rotten, smashed into the pavement, attracting wasps and creating enough of a mess that often people will chop down the trees that sprout up near their homes. But there are enough trees remaining that we can pick the most intact figs without having to buy any. When I cut them open they’re bright red inside, jammy and seedy and sweet, and I know a sacrificial wasp has been there and that I’m going to eat its remains stirred into my yogurt. I don’t mind, though.
Things feel more visceral here. The heat. The smell of the garbage. A cat runs by with a gigantic rat in its mouth. The best beach is down a steep incline and I’m not sure Clara is old enough to make the climb, but she does it. The caves surrounding the beach look intriguing and I have to warn her not to explore because campers use them as toilets and they smell like shit— there aren’t any other facilities around. At the same beach, we swim out deeper than usual because the water is so clear and still. We see something white glinting below- maybe a shell? My cousin dives down but surfaces empty handed. It was a tampon, he says. And yet everything is still so beautiful!
A seven year old doesn’t care much about beauty, though. I mean, I can point something out and get a “cool” or “wow!”, and the clear water is perpetually fascinating, but otherwise they move on quick. The more frustrating parts of the trip are when I want to dwell on beauty, turn it into a kind of nostalgia or melancholy or meditation. I want to stare at the big rock that looks like a petrified sailboat jutting out from the sea that you can only see on clear, calm days. I want to watch the change in colour of the sky when the sun sets, the way everything eventually melts into the sea. I want to look at the shape of the islands in the distance and think about how they haven’t changed over hundreds of years. But then I get interrupted by Clara’s questions (always prefaced by “I have a question!”) or her climbing into my lap or tugging on my arm.
This is a minor complaint though. I like to answer her questions and be pulled out of my own head, to feel her weight in my lap when she’s not sprinting away into the sea. And anyway, the islands and rocks and sunsets won’t go away or change. I can measure myself against them next time.
I wonder what Clara will remember most from this trip. I wonder what will change.
xoxo
Teri