The Trojans never stood a chance. It wasn’t guile and deceit that won the Greeks the war. It was attrition.
It is 4:30 in the afternoon and everyone’s napping, so it’s just me and the cicadas for the next little while…
Platanaki is exactly as I left it in 2019. The house my in-laws built and summered in for fifteen years after my father-in-law closed his tailor shop is still as charming and welcoming as ever, despite three years of uninhabited solitude occasioned by the pandemic and a losing battle with pancreatic cancer.
A lot of the flora is gone, including the prune, peach, walnut and almond trees. The botanical tableau that used to ascend four layers high to the wrought iron gate that meets the road has withered into a fading rainbow. Still, the canvas is showing signs of rebirth now that we’re here. I guess plants need humans after all. They suck in our carbon dioxide and remember to breathe again. Maybe it’s just that the roots of resilience and perseverance run deeper in soil that’s been cultivated for over eleven thousand years.
The wind, uncharacteristically discreet since we’ve arrived, has regained its confident bluster. I’ve come to appreciate the relativity of sound in peaceful surroundings.
This is not entirely a pleasure trip. We’ve come to settle some of my late father-in-law’s affairs.
The way they conduct business here is infuriatingly broken, but you learn to offset the fractured system with the simplicity of the grounded act. Not unlike preparing a complex dish using the most elemental ingredients: water, salt, garlic, olive oil, or whatever ripened gems of the day your vegetable garden, herb patch and fruit trees have to offer. It is a balancing act meant to foster the mouthfeel of “such is Life.”
The administrative tape is outlandishly red enough to make a Fauvist’s palette blush, yet the blue sky is as dependable as the sunrise. While the bureaucracy is so sclerotic inertia feels like the speed of light, the wind is a constant reminder that forward motion is possible.
It’s in the air, this strange mix of resignation and possibility. You sense it in the kindness that rages in the face of futility, the locals within earshot intervening on your behalf like crusaders to argue your case before unyielding functionaries. They know they’ve entered an uphill struggle and we are Sisyphus, yet they try.
And quite simply, that is the only takeaway that really matters — that despite the size of the stone in your way, somehow, you find a way.
That whatever pill you’re being served, you can always wash it down with a shot of tsipouro.