LONG LAZY SUMMERS

` BORN FREE… AS FREE AS THE WIND BLOWS…BORN FREE TO FOLLOW YOUR HEART…’ I think the song captures the first few years of my life in Crete. When we started out in the old house where his grandparents used to live in, the skipper and I…I’m calling him that now to give him a measure of anonymity… were as close to being really free as we could get. Rousseau said…` MAN IS BORN FREE AND EVERYWHERE HE IS IN CHAINS’… We would have scoffed at it because we felt free and untethered in spite of our living conditions. The house was small. On the outside, we were hemmed in all around. A common yard separated our place from his parent’s and aunt and uncle’s houses. On the right, resided an old lady who kept chickens and a male dog called Ruby. He walked around with his head hung low, wearing a thick chain and a huge cross dangling down his scrawny neck…the ones you get from churches blessed by the priest. On our left, another house breathed down on us, belonging to yet another aunt and uncle. We had a very small walled-in garden behind, where we threw a handful of petunia seeds and watered them when we remembered and that was it.

During the weekends and holidays in summer, the skipper and I would drive off to this sandy beach in Almirida, some 22km from Chania. We flung a few things in a basket and chucked it in the back of our two-door Alfasud. That was before beaches were organized with waiters bearing drinks from nearby cafeterias, serving you while you stretched out on deck chairs under the shade of striped umbrellas, slathering yourself with sunscreen and nipping in and out of the water. We roughed it out in the 80’s. We just jumped into the surf, came out dripping and sat about on the beach. There were no showers on the beach to wash off the salt and sand. We got back in the evening after having a meal at a tavern and watching the tide roll in and the sea turn a coppery red. We washed our feet at a tap in the yard, watched a bit of TV and then crashed into an unmade bed. Late in the morning towards midday, we got up with skin taut with dried sea water and sand and hair crusted with salt and set off again for another beach with his parents murmuring behind us…` Look at them! They’re living like tramps.’

Then a certain number of acquisitions…a child and worldly belongings crept in and threw a couple of chains around us. Human beings are the only creatures who have FREE WILL, so they say, and… `THERE’S THE RUB’…as Hamlet pacing the castle pondered in his famous soliloquy. The snag is that our FREE WILL gets our knickers into a knot more often than not. But the chains were still loose… we took the child everywhere we went. When she was a toddler we took her to Malaysia. We got lucky because she spent her waking hours on the plane crawling under the seats, picking up crumbs and dropping them in a plastic cup. She did the airlines a great service. When we ate at outdoor restaurants in summer, she slid under the table and played with the sand and pebbles. Annie was quite an adaptable child and so were our cats. They…I mean the cats… came and went as they pleased and begged around the neighbourhood when we went on holiday.

After a few years we decided to renovate the house. We tore down the store house behind and got ourselves a bigger back yard. It looked so pretty with its terracotta tiles that we became house proud and decided to grow flowers and started looking after them. But they were still carefree years. During the summer with no students to teach I would do absolutely nothing…in a manner of speaking, of course…just potter about in the garden, rustle up a quick meal, nip down to the shops with Annie in tow. We had summery meals in the back yard with birds chirping from treetops and went swimming in our shimmering blue seas and the FINALE … the three of us would take off for a holiday somewhere. 

Everything went on swimmingly well. Then the year before Annie left for university the old lady on our right died and we got that property, tore it down and built a brand new extension and put in a new garden and grew more plants to water and take care of. All within a few years, his relatives on the left died and we bought the property and bulldozed everything down and the skipper took up vegetable gardening. I’ve already written about the seriousness of this affair and suffice it to say, it’s still going strong. It’s been 15 years since Annie left and now instead of shaking off Rousseau’s chains that have insidiously wrapped themselves around us, we’re dragging a few metal balls along with them. Our lives are now completely hedged in by our vegetables, rose bushes, fruit trees, herbs, climbers, grape vines and potted plants…all thirsting for our attention. Now the skipper-cum-gardener, after diligent research, has become more knowledgeable about our flora and can be found in the dimming light of the evening, flitting like a shadow in the garden, spraying the life out of aphids and other unsuspecting parasites with some concoction he whipped up.

Voltaire, who hated Rousseau’s guts, once said…` It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.’…But we’re a little lucky because our chains are more seasonal. Most summer evenings we go around with a hose watering our plants. But in the blistering hot month of August when the cicadas come out with their dry shrill songs, most of our vegetables plants and seasonal flowers would have withered and we would have picked the last bunches of sweet grapes, sun kissed and crimson, hanging from our vines. We then put our water hoses down and take off for a holiday. We usually leave Miu in the garden to hunt for cicadas and geckos, a rich supplement to the food Jimmy feeds her when he comes around in the evenings.

But it’s early days yet…it’s July now and the grapes are still green. Annie and Laurent will be coming over for their holidays and we’re looking forward to great meals and long chats. So now it’s time for me to lay down my writing quill and luxuriate in a long lazy summer. I shall be back in September and hopefully will have lots to write about. Thank you so much for reading my quirky stories. I hope you have a wonderful summer for those in Europe and the States… in Malaysia enjoy your tropical showers and in Australia, wrap yourselves up nice and warm. Above all, have a blast with your freedom and keep yourselves healthy. All will be well.

Cheers!