365 Memories

Exactly seven years ago, I was on the island of Naxos , in the capital town of Chora . My husband and I were enjoying the second leg of our honeymoon, having traveled from Crete to this smaller island, following Ariadne's trail. We stayed at a charming hotel, the Anixis , located in the Old Town area, where cars are not permitted and where you get hopelessly, fabulously lost—for just moments at a time—in the maze of narrow, whitewashed streets that turn every which way and bring surprises of hidden doorways, bright red potted geraniums flashing against blue painted doorways. (Perhaps we did not escape Crete's labyrinth mythology after all!) The night before today's anniversary—that is, July 14—we were celebrating at the harbor: not Bastille Day, but the festival of Aghios (Saint) Nikódimos . A splendid display of color streaked through the black night sky. There were fireworks, their red smoke lingering over the docks after each screeching burst of light. Never to be outdo...

July. Time for watermelons, which I'd always eat right down through the white and palest green of the rind, all the way to the very skin because I didn't want the sweetness to end. I remember someone telling me that swallowing the black seeds meant a watermelon would grown in my belly—I never was that gullible, not even as a child. Still, I spat those seeds out, held contests to see which friend could spit them the farthest. The white ones, thin and soft, I usually ate along with the red flesh of the fruit. There was never anything so good as a watermelon when summer was reaching its hottest temperatures and the sun sapped your appetite for anything substantial. Adulthood has done nothing to curb my summertime watermelon cravings. In fact, my husband brought a giant one home last weekend, cut it up and stored it in four large Tupperware containers in the refrigerator —I have nearly eaten every piece, all on my own, since my husband is not home much and my son for some reason ...

My logical mind that likes order, my Presbyterian upbringing that makes me prone to sober reflection, taking things seriously . . . These aspects of my personality would have me believe that travel from point A to point B on the island of Crete would actually correspond to kilometers measured on a map. I am here to tell you: the one has nothing to do with the other. In July 2002, my husband and I honeymooned at the resort-heavy town of Elounda , a small dot in the northwest sector of the island. As it turned out, many of the things I wanted to see were at the opposite end of Crete. It didn't matter. We were adventurous, newly married, two for the road—on my husband's preferred mode of transportation , a motorcycle. Correction: it was not a motorcycle we rented but some kind of moped that had seen better days, but was serviceable. It put-putted along, my husband driving and I clinging to the back. I don't remember where we were headed for the first leg of our day trip, but ...

The final panel in a Greek Easter triptych: Friday, Saturday, and now the wee hours of the morning, officially Easter Sunday. "Christos anesti !" " Alithos anesti !" He is risen indeed. Leaving church past midnight, through the smoke of celebratory explosives, my mom and I found ourselves following George Kanellopoulos , my grandmother's cousin on the paternal side, a man who was probably a good twenty years younger than Yiayia , but who now looked the spitting image of my memories of her in her old age. He was, for an evening, a surrogate Greek papou . We went with him to his house over the protestations and histrionics of another cousin of my mother's (on her father's side); she wanted to know why we weren't going to her house, although we only had learned of her existence moments before. She carried on about how she'd found us and now we were being taken away, and po po po  . . . the Greek tragedy continued behind her own closed doors, whi...

Darkness, thick and warm on all sides, enveloping us. Standing in a crush of bodies, shoulder to shoulder at the back of Saint Athanasios —the very same church where, a century ago, my grandmother attended Easter services. 2007 now, the pilgrimage made, a dream realized: to attend the resurrection service in the town of Filiatra ; to go to church with relatives, whom we had found only that afternoon (a story worthy of its own posting) thanks to the owner of one of the town's many kiosks. Expectation in the air, candles—this time white; those of children adorned with ribbons and trinkets—held unlit in eager hands. The lights in the sanctuary were extinguished just before midnight. Only the luminous canopy of this church's epitaphios , the bier of Christ, now reaches out its gleaming fingers to the congregation. The priest disappears behind the iconostasis . When he bursts back through, it is with joy and no longer grief: he is holding aloft a candle lit from the holy flame of Je...

April 2007. Great and Holy Friday, as it is today in 2009. I am sitting with my mother in the "women's section" of the Orthodox church of Agios Nikolaos (St. Nicholas) in the sea town of Methoni in the province of Messinia , located in the hand-shaped Peloponnese of Greece. A row of women, perched like crows in their wooden seats, keep watchful eyes on everyone in the church. I am glad to be sitting behind and not before them; not all of them seem benign. We have each purchased a long, skinny, buff-colored candle, lit it just inside the church doors and pushed it down into a round tray of wheat berries to stand, burning in memory with dozens of others. It is 7:30 PM, and we will not leave the church until 11:00—even then, there will be one last ritual to observe. Contrary to expectations, the time passes quickly, awash in sacred sights, sounds, smells. In the center of the church, the epitaphios , symbolic bier of Christ; it is covered by a canopy of red and white carna...

In addition to advocating emotional well-being through catharsis (any Greek can tell you about catharsis; we invented it!), my mother encouraged a healthy respect for the body and its nourishment from a young age. Lest you jump to conclusions, she had neither the mouth of a sailor (see earlier post on four-letter vocal projections), nor was she ever a gorp-munching, clog-wearing, "crunchy," free love type—not in the least, despite the 1970s headscarves (OK, and pantsuits; the original tree huggers didn't wear pantsuits, did they?). But our food was mostly healthy when "health" was not yet on America's radar. Again, call in the Greeks. My mother would tell you: she ate yogurt growing up, and it was a neighborhood oddity. It was a Greek thing. Nobody in the States was eating yogurt, not to speak of, not then, not in any form. When I was growing up, it was more of a commodity. You found it in the supermarket, and you generally had one brand only: the somewhat ...

Detroit in the 1970s. My aunt (my mother's sister, the eldest child out of six in the family) had a finished basement in her house, and she would host large family parties there—often I think, although pretty soon after my birth, we left the Detroit area and so were too far away to participate in many of these celebrations. I think I attended two of the parties, but even to me, it felt like a ritual occurrence, such was the welcoming atmosphere, the instant acceptance of family. Jean and Louis (my aunt and uncle), plus their grown kids and my cousins once removed (who were closer in age to me than my first cousins), opened their home and their hearts, their basement and their kitchen to us all. I was very young, so I don't remember much, nor do I trust the memories I do have; they may just be associations. Mostly I remember two things, and the first is culinary. When we came through the front door of the house (or maybe it was a side door? I have an image of a set of two doors,...

Thirteen years old, on the cusp of my own turbulent waves of adolescence. No longer a child but not yet anything other, I walked with my parents back through time; we stumbled among the rubble of ages, the ruins of Poseidon's temple at Cape Sounion. A spring day, blue Aegean sky and bleached white marble—the temple's Doric columns holding up the heavens, as if to cushion the proud, forgotten Olympians in their centuries of slumber. If they awoke, what would they take me for: supplicant or sacrilegious trespasser? I walked near the promontory's edge, looked across the water in the direction of Crete and saw—what? Was my command of mythology solid enough then to have imagined a ship approaching, its black sail hoisted instead of white? Hellenism, Romanticism—there we saw the name of Byron carved deep into ancient stone. However loyal to Greece, a mortal name gouged into holy marble seems enough to summon a strike of the trident. We strolled the once-sacred ground, now swellin...