In the Middle of It All
A letter from Paros, Greece
I am, with my husband and four children, on the tiny Greek island of Paros. We are staying in a whitewashed stone villa, like a Minecraft square set into what feels almost like a desert—hot, dry, and windy. We rented a white Peugeot van that we use to crawl up and down the steep mountain, and to drive the road that runs around the perimeter of the island, alongside the teal Aegean Sea.
Today we visited a farm that is run by one man, The Farmer they called him, and one woman, The Gardener, who our tour guide said is 88 years old. On the farm they grow olive trees, caper bushes, barley to feed the few goats and sheep. The capers run along the stone walls they’ve placed by hand to terrace the earth, trapping the rainwater on each level so it is not lost to the ocean at the base of the mountain. There is a single fig tree that this family inherited, and it refuses to grow taller than the fence that protects it from the harsh ocean winds.
For lunch we ate bread with olive oil, olives, gruyere, crushed oregano, and chili jam from the farm. We had a salad of cherry tomatoes, samphire (or sea fennel), soft cheese, olives, and herbs; spinach pie; and chickpeas. The wine was from the farm too, only 500 bottles made each year, not very good but we drank it. Dessert was spoon sweet, candied lemon, atop yogurt. The kids made a meal mostly out of bread and cheese. We made small talk with honeymooners from Vancouver and a family from Baltimore.
In the afternoon we drove to the beach at the edge of town. The view was stunning and the kids played in the sand, but it was so windy that after a while we sat huddled and trembling under our towels.
I am glad we brought the children—there is so much I want travel to teach them—but it is often difficult to be so close to relaxation, so close to vacation, but not able to enter into it… because my son is whining that he is hungry or has to pee or his sister looked at him wrong, or my now-teenaged daughter is pouting for no reason at all. You feel like you have made it into the postcard setting, you are standing inside the actual photograph of the beach, but the conditions for it are all wrong, in that someone is trilling in your ear, kicking sand in your eye, begging you to buy twenty-euro French fries, complaining because they can’t find their sandals. Crying because they want to go back or don’t want to go back. Statistically speaking, it is hard to keep four children happy for any stretch of time longer than about fifteen minutes. But they are being challenged, despite the idyllic surroundings, forced to constantly compromise and apologize. They are eating foods they haven’t before, learning to thank someone in another language, thinking maybe just a little about what life is like outside of their bubble. In my head I tell myself, “Absorb, absorb, absorb,” as in, take all the complaints and difficulties inside you, hold them, do not push them back out into the world in the form of impatience or discontent. It is incredible to be here, but easy is not a word I would use.
And then there was an hour at dinner when the vacation did come: a cocktail, shrimp and orzo pasta, the kids silly and happy, my husband and I catching one another’s eyes above their heads to smile. For a while I do not worry if we are making too much noise; I do not add up the bill for all the enormous bowls of linguine no one finished; I do not consider tomorrow’s itinerary and when we should sleep. One hour of this is enough; it is all we need to keep going, to calmly break up the fights in the back of the van that start as soon as we are headed home from dinner. One hour of this is more than enough.
