Summer 2021

In 1967 I was renting a one-room basement apartment in a working-class area of Athens. The windows were just above street level and offered a view of feet, wheels, and paws.

Every day at six in the morning a knock clattered on the metal shutters above my bed. I staggered to the kitchen corner to get my bowl, opened the shutters, exchanged kalimera, good morning, with a small, leathery man who always had a cigarette dangling from his mouth. From the back of his motorized cart he lifted a block of ice, bent down towards my window and plonked the ice into the bowl. I took the ice to the lead-lined icebox I had bought in the flea market in Monastiraki, made a coffee on the hot plate and started to write. My plan was to settle in Greece and become a writer. I supported myself by teaching English in the evenings.

I wrote until the fishmonger came singing his wares down the street a couple of hours later. His face was a dried-up river bed. He walked with a steady rhythm and had a flat straw basket of fish perched on his head. Behind him paraded a motley assortment of scrawny cats, whose plaintive cries almost drowned his own. When other people were on the street, he made as if to kick the cats and swore at them. But when he thought nobody was looking, he slipped them tiddlers and muttered to them softly.

We build our own little world. And within this world, the children create another little world. I work in my over-ambitious garden by the chicken house.

I have dug out the seasonal spring to capture the water in a stone basin. The kids revel in the dirt pile: “Mud Chiefs” is the name of the game. It’s not “King of the Mountain,” or building roads for matchbox cars, but something that involves smearing mud over their entire naked bodies and running up and tumbling down the mound. They do this for hours, and I can see them from the tractor as I mow the pastures, hacking back our parsnip invasion, in an effort to support healthier legumes for grazing. In an effort to establish control.

The August-high parsnip plants hit the bucket of the tractor. The seeds flick onto the hood, slide the smooth green surface bouncing with the turbulence of the engine, and cascade the crown to fall back to earth. Parsnip is not kind: opportunistic, it spreads wildly across our hay field and seeks out small cuts in our skin. It finds little fissures to implant its poison. If not washed off quickly, it will spring to life as blisters on our bodies. Painful blisters that pop and their footprint remains a red circle on the skin for months. The marks remain long after the pain, and in a few months’ time finally fade. It’s a way the land teaches respect, and I respect the parsnip, but I still want to get rid of it.

It’s embarrassing to admit this, but there have been nights when I’ve cried for our old apartment. Not gracefully, either, but in choking, gasping sobs, which I tried to muffle with a pillow so that my mother-in-law sleeping across the hall would not hear.

My husband, Nathan, would try to point out the silver linings as he wiped away my tears—we were saving so much money on rent and food, my commute to school had practically disappeared, and this new place, when we finally moved in, would have a room for a nursery. When that didn’t help, he’d admit that he missed it too. Together, we would list the things we missed: How the morning sunlight gave color to our gray walls in the winter; how we read barefoot on the patio together in the summer. He missed walking to the movie theatre together on a weeknight. I missed the sound of his footsteps coming down the corridor, the sound of him coming home. And then, having exhausted myself with memories, I’d fall asleep on the mattress that still did not want me.

Kit Kats were worth jail time. At the Target checkout, I waited for the right moment to strike.

The window of opportunity rested on the convergence of several things: One, Mom would walk ahead of me towards the register. Two, the cashier’s eyes would lower after his customary half-hearted greeting. Three, I would be just close enough to the boxes of candy to get what I wanted without drawing suspicion. Mom held her Visa, overseeing the flow of lettuce, carrots, and Diet Mountain Dew into bulls-eye-stamped plastic bags. Together, they would make up my breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next three weeks until I performed in my upcoming ballet competition.

Out of the darkness, a dancer appeared. The diffused beam surrounded her in particles of light, illuminating her curvy figure as she took the stage with the presence of a bullfighter

Her shadow fell like a veil, dropping a silhouette that was neither forced nor natural.

I imagined she was angry. She detested the pain in her life, but she confronted her losses the way I longed to defy my own. The dancer held her position, contemplating the next move. I memorized her features, arm positions, and every detail of her dress: Its high waist, scooped V-neck, triple ruffle running diagonally around her toned body until it graced the floor. When she slowly turned to face the audience, her eyes were fixed downward, not yet acknowledging the room of strangers. Her hands started clapping in counter rhythm while the music grew louder. My eyes were glued to her, goosebumps traveling from spine to scalp. The dancer lifted the skirt of her long, black dress, shifted her gaze to the audience, and started to play percussion with her shoes.

If you get the opportunity to hang out with a five-year-old for twenty-four hours a week during not only a blazing Phoenix summer but a pandemic, rejoice!

You won’t have a moment of privacy (think sock puppet shoved under the bathroom door and “Grandma, Grandma!” while you’re sitting on the toilet), but you’ll be so busy spinning in the wake of a happy tornado, you’ll never even have time to think about the apocalypse, not to mention your long-term relationship in crisis or the loss of your beloved dog. The dog that was kept by the man who said you do not “meet his safety guidelines” due to your watching this young dervish while your state’s COVID numbers shoot through the roof. No worries. You and the little girl can have the time of your lives if you just:

Let Her Cook:

Each week, plan something (anything) she can cook. When you were a Montessori teacher back in the day, the once-a-week cooking projects were the kids’ all-time favorites. Let her squeeze lemons to make lemonade, press cookie-cutter hearts into pie crust, bake cupcakes, crisscross peanut-butter cookies with a fork, slice bananas, top pizza with shredded mozzarella, and crack an egg. Listen to her say, “This tastes like joy!” when she bites into the cupcake or, “Oh, my goodness, look at all this egg jelly!” as the yellow and clear goop oozes into the bowl like slime.