Recharging those Downeast batteries

When I turn left out my driveway--the serpentine journey down the mountain

Greece is where I’ve always come to recharge my depleted batteries after a long winter of discontent. The cold, the darkness, and the often rainy spring is anathema in fair Hellas. I have a deep and abiding passion for this country--I know that I can be insufferable with my friends back home, who probably can't understand the joy and the levity that this place imbues in me.

But the truth be told, the Downeast darkness is also something I appreciate—to a small degree. (For one, I think I get more accomplished inside when the weather outside is less inviting.) The Maine weather and accompanying human temperament puts this place, with its 320 days of sunshine, into sweet perspective.

I have never loved two places—Maine and Greece—so much. Partly because it stands to reason that you can have too much of a good thing. So when my Americans friends, who are transitioning here full-time from their northern New England home, ask when I’ll be “retiring” (a word unfamiliar to my lexicon), to the little house in the olive grove, I have no ready answer. The simple one is that “circumstances” (money, family, obligations) won’t allow it anytime soon. But I see a slow and stead transition in the years to come.

Truthfully, I would miss my friends, my family, our property that borders a national wildlife refuge and looks over the mostly pristine western Cobscook Bay. There is a rhythm to life that we come to expect and appreciate back home. And besides, not only do I need to work, but I like to work. And by work, I almost always mean “work outside”: in the garden, in the woods, in the pastures. And sometimes inside, at my desk, pouring over someone else’s scholarship, making it more right, more comprehensible.

Like most things in life, the key is finding some kind of balance. A life here and a life there, that’s the object.

Splitting the difference

So just how can we reach an equilibrium, one that honors both lives, both places, rich as they are with friends and family, nature and culture, with so many wondrous things to do?

Like taking that first swim in April (here) or there (in June? Maybe?). So I test the proverbial waters of life in two places, ever aware of the responsibilities inherent in two lives: spouse and children (and perhaps someday grandchildren), friends and family, and managing properties two oceans apart.

Life is full of choices—clearly I am a fortunate soul to have choices—none of which are absolute.

Reflecting on loss

I think often of my sister Dyan, who we lost in December after a brief illness. When I first visited her after her initial diagnosis, she sensed my sadness. She was good at reading her baby brother’s varied emotional states.

One of my best buddies--my sister Dyan--in one of my favorite places on earth

“Why are you so sad?” she asked quisically. I refused to answer or pretended not to hear the question. So she continued.

“Look, I’m dying, that’s all. Your life is beautiful and you should enjoy your life.”

Our mother, a few years earlier, also gravely ill, had a similar perspective on the large sweep of life. Alone together one night, she told me: “You know Jonathan, everything changes, nothing ever stays the same.” The comment, in retrospect, was the ultimate Buddhist expression of impermenance and non-attachment: Our joys are fleeting, and our suffering is fleeting too.

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Yes, the Cretan side of my family has a penchant for waxing philosophical. As I child and even as a young adult, it annoyed me to no end—old foggies offering homilies on the very subject of existence itself.

Now I have drifted toward that same old family trait. I suppose it was inevitable.

The rain that never comes

In southern Messenia, the rains of fall and winter bring life to a parched landscape. This year too much rain in the spring, an anomaly, has brought devastation for a second year to the fall olive harvest. The olive harvest is the currency of life in Messenia. Everyone has a few hundred (or thousand trees), which determine your net worth.

Every day at around 2 p.m. fierce thunderclouds form in a north-south line about 20 kilometers inland from southern tip of the Messenian peninsula, which is the southwestern tip of the Peloponnese. But the prevailing ocean winds, blowing across the large and open expanse of the eastern Mediterranean pushes this severe weather away from us and toward Laconia, the neighboring prefecture, with Sparta at its center, and the coastal towns further south.

Friends returning from relatively nearby Kalamata (50+ kilometers to the north) tell of downpours, powerful winds, and hailstorms. Yesterday friends showed me photographs of their heavily damaged cars that were parked at the Kalamata airport: hundreds of dings in the hoods and roofs, broken windshields. These weather systems are borne on the 7500-foot peaks that separate Messenia from Arcadia, the mountainous prefecture to the north.

But here, with few exceptions, the skies remain crystal clear and rain-free from mid-May until mid-October. In some years there will no rain for six months at a time—just about the opposite of our weather in Downeast Maine.

Sunset run