Saturday evening, my village had a panygyri, a festival coinciding with the name day of Agia Paraskevi, a female saint from the time of Christ.  Curious about her, I asked many Greek friends who Agia Paraskevi was and no one could tell me.  One American friend, a scholar in the field of religion, informed me that Agia Paraskevi had been an early Christian martyr known for protecting eyesight.  I wanted to know more.

With a Greek friend, I Googled the saint and learned that, as a young woman in about 100 A.D., Agia Paraskevi committed to being a Christian and to proselytizing.  She refused all efforts to be married off or confined.  Eventually, she was imprisoned and tortured by a Roman emperor who poured oil and tar on her, yet she survived unharmed.  Incredulous, the Emperor had oil poured on his own body and became blinded.  Agia Paraskevi restored his eyesight and he converted to Christianity.  Unfortunately, our saint, a true martyr, was eventually beheaded.

Despitre the fact that few Greeks know her story, Agia Paraskevi is celebrated every year on July 26.  In addition, the day of Friday, Paraskevi, is named after her.  To add to the July 26 celebration, my village decided to have an official inauguration of our village park which was redone last year.  Everyone in the village and in the local area was invited to the party.  The night would have food, wine, speeches, music and dancing.  I doubted the park could hold more than 100 people.  In a remarkably Greek way, just about the right number of people showed up.

Beforehand, I was invited to assist with preparation of the salad.  I arrived at our village hall on time to discover that only a few village leaders and most of the village kids were there.  In typical Greek style, we had huge numbers of cucumbers, peppers and onions to cut up, but no utensils.  I went back to my house for peelers, knives and large bowls.  Cutting the vegetables was chaotic and, cover with green cucmber juice, I declined to go back later to assist with the tomatoes.

The festival began with too many lengthy welcoming speeches since every village leader -- all male -- wanted his moment of fame.  Next came the young people's dance program, also, in my opinion, too long.  The kids were in costume and took their performance very seriously.  I was struck by the way Greeks continue to teach at least some children the traditional dances as a way of preserving the culture.

Next came the food.  I was amazed by the quantity and by how quickly everyone was served with the village kids doing most of the work.  The main dish was a traditional stew of beef and wheat which did not look appealing to me and which several Greek friends had warned me about, so I passed up a chance at tasting it.  Perhaps I missed something wonderful.  

For me, the best part of the evening was seeing the former mayor of Molivos whom I had known 27 years earlier.  Costas Doukas, a member of the Communist Party, was responsible in the early tourist period of the 1970s and 1980s for keeping our neighbor town of Molivos looking beautiful, preserving the Aegean architecture of stone buildings and cobblestone strees, and preventing inappropriate commercial development.  I was honored that Costas remembered me from so long ago.  I look forward to meeting him for coffee and a real chat this coming week.

The party went on until the wee hours with bouzouki music and dancing.  I was one of the earliest to leave.  Although I was proud that our village could pull off such a major event, I have been to too many Greek festivals.  I heard the music through my windows, noting that the party ended at 2 a.m.  Many of my pensioner neighbors stayed until the end.

The time has come for me to leave Greece, both literally and figuratively.  I am missing the U.S. presidential campaign on television, my well-equipped office, movies and Thai food, my Greek immigrangt cats, and most of all my husband, friends and family.  I have enjoyed being part of and learning about Greek village life, but I thrive on a wider range of stimulating activities.  

Let's face it -- I could never live in a village, not my rural village or the more touristy village down the hill.  I once thought life in a village would be romantic and absorbing.  I now know that, for me, the romance comes mainly on cold winter nights in California when I dream about Greece or on a clear bright evening here in the village as I watch the blood orange Aegean sun set in the violet sea.  After two months of sunsets, it is definitely time to go home.

Making Skordalia

I was once told that skordalia, a garlic potato paste, was conceived in Greece as a way to disguise the smell of cheap fish.  That may have been true, but today Greeks -- and some foreigners -- have developed a love of the stuff -- with or without fish.  It is now served with fried eggplant, cooked beets, and fried zucchini as well as fish dishes.  In my third cooking lesson with my neighbor Eleni, I discovered that skordalia is pretty easy to make.

You start with a potato puree (I think in the U.S. this would be instant mashed potatoes).  You moisten the mix with hot water until you have a paste.  You add salt, a drop of vinegar, and some olive oil, and then as much minced fresh garlic as you like.  We put a lot of garlic in my first preparation of skordalia because I adore garlic.  I went around all day with the inside of my mouth tasting like a garlic bulb.  Not too pleasant.  I'd recommend only a small amount of garlic for beginners.

Fish and Visitors

Speaking of fish, I remember an old expression that visitors, like fish, should stay in the house for only three days.  I have recently had two sets of wonderful visitors, and I learned that for me the three-day limit is just about right.  I loved showing my guests around my island, swimming at different beaches, and eating out at my favorite restaurants.  I loved having company for breakfast coffee, evening cocktails, and drives up and down my hill to the sea.

What I learned, however, is that I am an obsessively work-oriented person.  Right now I'm working on a new novel.  After three days of relaxation, I begin to get edgy.  I feel the need to be productive.  I want something to show for myself at the end of the day.  Thus, saying good-bye to my visitors meant taking up again with my computer.  Now my Dell may not be quite as interesting as my American friends from Turkey or my Greek teacher from Athens, but Dell does hang on my every word -- and that means a lot.

My God-Daughter Comes Home

Many of you know that I have a Greek god-daughter, Katerina, who comes from this island of Lesbos and whose birth I witnessed in Mytilini many years ago.  Some of you may have read my memoir about our relationship over the past 26 years (NONA: A DIFFERENT KIND OF MOTHERHOOD, 2007, available from online bookstores).  So, when Katerina, who has been living in Amsterdam for the past two years, came back to the village a couple of days ago for her summer vacation, it was, in some ways, like revisiting the past.

Of course, we had a lot of present-day news to exchange -- studies, jobs, boyfriend, family gossip, life in Amsterdam and California.  Underlying all the excitement of reconnecting are memories of times from village life going back 25, 20, 15 and 5 years.  I've been asking myself how that makes me feel, and I've discovered that while I feel nostalgia for the past, I have absolutely no desire to return to it.  Katerina today is a fascinating, endearing and ever-changing adult.  She is like a strand of pearls that becomes more and more beautiful over time, as age makes the pearls' color and lustre deepen into something of greater value.

As my friends and family know, I am a terrible cook and dislike spending time in the kitchen.  I have never tried to cook Greek food -- much as I like it -- because it takes a lot of time and uses a lot of oil, more than I am accustomed to consuming.  Thus, it is strange that I am now, in Lesbos, taking Greek cooking lessons.  Let me explain how this all came about.

Eggplants

My neighbors, Nikos and Eleni Yilaris, have a small farm just below my veranda.  They are in their 80s and come out every morning around 7 a.m., before it gets too hot, to attend to their plants and animals.  They always bring me gifts from the farm -- fruit, eggs, vegetables.  A few days ago, Eleni brought me two small eggplants.  I had to admit that I had no idea how to cook them.  

Eleni immediately decided to give me a lesson.  We cut the eggplants into strange looking flowers with long thin petals, salted them, and cooked them a long time in olive oil.  They were delicious.  Even better for me was our gossip about the village, Greek customs, and the life of a Greek farmer.

Zucchini

Today was my second cooking lesson -- zucchini, which has a much nicer name in Greek, kolokithakia.  We washed and scraped the zucchini a bit, cut them into slices, salted them, and put them in the refrigerator for a half hour to get them thoroughly saturated with salt.  People on low salt diets should definitely skip this step, although the salt adds a lot to the flavor.  Then we floured each slice of zucchini on both sides.  Then the SECRET!  We dipped the floured slices in a bit of water which keeps the zucchini from burning.  We cooked the slices in very hot olive oil for what seemed to be ten minutes for the first side, five minutes for the second.

The zucchini were simply delicious.  After the slices cooled, I put them in a "tupper," which is Greek for a plastic container.  I explained to Eleni the humor to Americans of calling it a "tupper," but I don't think she got the joke.  My next lesson will be skordalia.  This is a mix of potato and garlic that Greeks originated to compensate for the taste of a bland fish called galleos.  They got to like their skordalia so much, they now eat it on beets and eggplant.  Greece would be an easy place to become a vegetarian except that you'd have to give up lamb.

Sex Roles

During today's lesson, Eleni and I had a discussion about sex roles.  I explained that, as a feminist, I believed men should help cook and women should be able to hang out at the cafeneion.  Eleni told me that when her sisters from Australia came to Greece, their husbands often helped out around the house. 

I asked her if her husband Nikos helped in the kitchen and she looked at me with scorn.  She didn't want him in her kitchen and she didn't want to go to the cafeneion.  Feminism is hard to sell retroactively.  I'm not even going to try.  Still, I'm glad the younger generation of Greek women is hitting the bars, even though they rarely demand that their partners help out in the kitchen.

I am thoroughly enjoying my cooking lessons, as well as the the results.  Home-cooked Greek food is much better than taverna food, but even more, the conversation around the stove is teaching me a great deal about my village.

In many tourist shops in Plaka, visitors can buy "The Sounds of Greece," a CD that bounces with bouzouki music or moans with blues-like rembetika. A CD of sounds heard on any day in my Greek village would be very different.

My CD would start with a symphony of chirping, birds welcoming the new day at 5:30 in the morning. I'm a light sleeper and always wake up to check the clock. As I try to go back to sleep, I hear the goat sound.  While I know that sheep, not goats, "baa", it is baaing that comes out of the goat living in the garden below my house.

Dog sounds -- yelping and barking -- echo through my village some of the day and much of the night. These are dogs tied up near chicken coops to scare away the foxes. I find it sad that some dogs live their lives this way, but Greek villagers don't seem to be willing or able to come up with another way to protect their chickens.

July and August bring a wheezing, buzzing sound in the afternoon -- the crickets who only stop their cacaphony when the sun goes down.

Another daily, but intermittent, animal sound is men chatting in one of the two cafeneions just above my house. These two competing cafeneions attract different regular clienteles. Fortunately, they sell enough coffee, beer and retsina to both stay in business. Cafeneion sounds are loudest around 10  a.m. over morning coffee and after lunch and a nap, say, from 6 to 9 p.m. The only thing that bothers me about cafeneion sounds is that none of them are female. Local women do not sit in cafeneions, although a few foreign women do. Since there is no other diversion in our village, foreigners tend to drink a lot. While I have never seen anyone drunk, I'm sure many foreigners are developing cases of cirrhosis.

On Fridays and Saturdays, I usually hear Greek sounds that resemble tourist CDs -- taped bouzouki music playing at the three tavernas just below the village. The music reminds me it's the weekend and it always stops around midnight. It provides a sort of Aegean lullaby when I'm in bed early.

The one village sound I dislike is the loudspeaker on the trucks that deliver food and goods to the village. The sound is exceptionally loud, but then we have many old, deaf pensioners in the village. While I try to ignore the sound, I hear myself listening for shouts of "carrots," "sardines," and "cherries."  Occasionally, I buy something and save a trip down the hill to the supermarket. I guess that makes the jarring vendor's microphone worth it.

I'm embarrassed to tell overnight visitors coming to visit me in the village to bring ear plugs, but for the summer I have stocked a good supply of plugs for them and me.