“Matter has no age.” (Odysseas Elytis)

I’ve been writing about a family issue that has plunged me into a deep pool of sadness, of shame, and regret. I can’t go into detail except to say that nothing is what it seems. And these days it seems that the family home I have celebrated for 4 decades might not be what I’ve believed it to be after all. So then what it is? A place to live, emptied of its memories and its accumulations of love. For now that’s how it feels. I wake up in the morning and I wonder how I will get through the day. Days. Because it’s been this way for a month at least. My husband says this can be resolved and I love his optimism. I wish I could share it.

Just now I went into the greenhouse and two of the small olive trees are in bud. I bought them with hope. And as arboreal reminders of the months I spent living on Crete in my early 20s. I’ve written about this in my book, Mnemonic: A Book of Trees, and when I remember those months, the olive trees that surrounded the village where I lived come beautifully to mind. Greek poetry is infused with olives: the Odyssey (Odysseus blinded Polyphemus with an olive stake and when he returned home, it was to a marriage bed constructed around a living olive trunk), George Seferis,

The olive trees with the wrinkles of our fathers

the rocks with the wisdom of our fathers

and our brother’s blood alive on the earth

were a vital joy, a rich pattern

for the souls who knew their prayer.

Matter has no age. Change is all it knows.
Take it from start or end. Return flows calmly
Forward and you follow
Feigning indifference but pulling
The rope to a deserted Myrtle cove
Not missing an olive tree
Oh sea
You wake and everything renews.

I dream my way back to those years, before the decades that followed, full of what I thought was a lasting and beautiful life’s work. I loved the dry grass in the olive grove owned by the family who rented me a room on the second storey of their home, a whitewashed building with a blue door and a terrace where I’d sit with my notebook, trying to writing everything down: the sound of the donkeys as they tripped down the narrow lane to the harbour, the scent of bread in the bakery across the road, sun on the ocean, glittering like poetry, and the taste of coffee made in a little copper briki, its bitter sediment on the bottom of the white cup. There was someone who wanted to marry me there, a man with a name out of the old stories, and because I was afraid of what he made me feel, I left.

When the olive blossoms open, the greenhouse will smell of those days, sweet and wistful. If I sit on the blue chair by the open door and close my eyes, none of this will have happened. (Matter has no age.) Donkey bells, voices calling from the boats that have just come in with the night’s catch, Aphrodite who owned the house where I lived knocking at my door with a plate of warm bread and olives and fresh sheets for my bed.

My husband’s optimism is in everything he does. He has been cleaning the decks where we’ve all eaten on summer visits, he’s been raking the long field where the little children play and organize grand performances to which we’re invited. Two swallows have been swooping over the blue roof today, looking for a place to nest. I want them to stay. They will, or they won’t.

Note: The Seferis is from “Mythistorema”, trans. Edmund Keeley and the Elytis is from “As Endymion”, trans. Olga Broumas.