The season for taking long(-ish) country walks is coming to a close, as the days become longer (at an amazingly fast rate) and warmer, resulting in the outcome that, when you get back to the house, the first thing you feel compelled to do is take all your togs off and take a tepid shower. I can confess here and now that we’ve already taken our first tentative outdoor showers this year, having been seduced by the baking sunshine that we’ve enjoyed a couple of times this past few weeks, a harbinger of the successive ‘scorchio‘ summer days that will soon be upon us, no doubt kicking in without much warning during the first week of May. For several months every summer we barely give a second glance to our indoor shower, taking all our showers in the garden, where it’s bliss to do so under the shade of the ‘sail,’ and then feel yourself drying off even before you can towel yourself down.

I’ve talked before about the fact that you can always tell instantly if a house is owned by Greeks or foreigners by whether it sports a swimming pool or simply an outdoor shower area, which can sometimes simply consist of a piece of hose hooked up to a fence or wall, just at sufficient height to do the necessary, as it were. If there’s a pool, then more than likely it’s foreigners who’ve bought their place in the sun in order to live the dream, often whilst blissfully unaware of what it’s going to cost them to run and maintain that status symbol that puts one in mind of a David Hockney painting. Greek’s houses more often than not (with the exception only of a few suburban areas of Athens where the politicians and TV stars live) won’t waste time and money on a pool when a shower head screwed to a fence will be all that’s needed to cool off during the long, often unbearably hot, summer months.

So, right now, we’re well aware that the long (sometimes 10k) walks that we may do during the winter months here will once again give way to the short walk from the car to the beach when we fully enter ‘summer’ mode. The photo at the top of this post was taken a couple of afternoons ago, at around 4.00pm, an hour when we’re usually sleeping. Now and then, when we both can’t seem to drop off, it’s a mixed blessing because, even though not to be able to sleep in the afternoon can be a bit irritating, it’s also a glorious time to go for a quiet stroll in the countryside around the village, because the rest of the world is asleep, and there’s a beautiful calm about the place. The only sound we could hear during that half-hour walk was that of all the many birds that abound in the rural landscape at the moment, and the breeze in the trees. Oh, and the occasional lizard that’s just woken up from its winter sleep and is now rustling in the undergrowth.

I took the next two during the same walk…

That lovely tree with the white blossoms on it, we couldn’t be sure what it was. We theorised that it was maybe a citrus of some kind, but we don’t really have a clue. If anyone out there can enlighten us, then please post a comment. I’d be fascinated to learn more about it. The lemon tree is a good specimen, and a good illustration of something else I’ve mentioned before (notably in my Ramblings From Rhodes series of books), and that’s the fact that people here generally don’t pick lemons until they need them. Of course, there are trees that are grown for the market, but local people, almost without exception, have trees for their own use, and these are minor miracles in that the fruit will stay ripe and ready for harvesting for months on end, meaning that you only need to pick the fruit as and when you need it. It’s testimony to the trust among local people too that the tree I photographed is down a dirt track in someone’s unfenced horafi that’s hidden from prying eyes, meaning that, had we been the types to steal a few fruit, we could have done so. No one around here steals from their neighbours. It’s as simple as that.

Lastly, I’ve also often talked about the fact that, even without being aware of it, many Greek people practice recycling in sometimes most inventive ways. Having the opportunity yesterday to drop by on a good friend, Maria, who lives along a lane among some thermokipia very near to Ierapetra, I was struck by her creativity with old water bottles, the kind that are used in office water dispensers. I’m sure you’ll have come across them at some point. Maria is around seventy and lives next-door to her daughter, who uses her as a regular child-minder for her toddler while she’s at work during the week. Because she’s at home most of the time, she busies herself manufacturing creams and pastes for all kinds of useful purposes. On this visit she gave us a couple of small pots of perfumed moisturising cream that she’d made herself, using all natural ingredients. One was for the man to use after a shave (and thus for moi), and the other a more general moisturiser that my wife can use at the end of the day. Maria also paints all kinds of lovely floral designs on to flower pots and frequently gives them as presents to people that she knows. One thing you can be sure about in Maria’s case, she’s never the type to say “I’m bored.”

Just look at what a little creativity can do when you have some old water bottles (and some paint) on your hands though, as you look at the photos I took of the wall beside the path leading to Maria’s front door…

Just to finish off this post: I’m addressing this bit to fellow Cretan residents: Is it me, or are there more than the usual number of locusts around this year? We seem to be coming across them very frequently whilst outdoors. They often take off when disturbed, giving the impression sometimes that they may have been a small bird as they fly off and you just catch them out of the corner of your eye. I often wonder if we ought to try and bump them off when we find them sitting on a plant in the garden. My gut instinct is to leave them be, but my beloved says they’ll eat our precious plant foliage and ought to be dispatched without mercy. What do you think?

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And here’s the link to the new short story “Outage.”