The Trojans never stood a chance. It wasn’t guile and deceit that won the Greeks the war. It was attrition.
Seventeen Days in Platanaki
Vignettes drawn from our 2022 summer travels to this quiet Greek hamlet located 18 km northeast of Thebes.
Bucolic, yes, but in a cosmic way.
I grew up believing fig trees were the frailest of all fruit-bearing plants. We had two, which my dad and I overwintered into the ground every fall. I thought them cowards for not standing up to our cold Canadian climate, and I resented the trench-digging, tree-bending, back-breaking inconvenience they put us through for the handful of figs they yielded every year.
I was too young and New World to recognize we weren’t cultivating these trees to reap a bountiful harvest, for one solitary late-August fig sufficed to gift my parents a taste of home.
The shores that launched a thousand ships.
Flying is an act of humility; ingenuity without overreach; the quiet dependability of Pegasus above the irreverent hubris of Icarus.