Nobody believes Greece has a winter, but in fact Greek winters can be very bleak. It snows in Athens and, in the palely sunny Peloponnese where I live a biting wind can blow, apparently straight from Siberia, for days straight. Greek villagers have a particular verb for such a wind: it harvests.
There are various kinds of harvests, and this past winter Maria, my friend and neighbour of 32 years, was gathered in, as my grandmothers would have said. As the villagers buried her, she would have been amused, I think, to see the priest wearing a scarf under his stole. Maria was 89, and had never lived anywhere else but here; she had made an occasional visit to Kalamata, 25km away, but had never been to Athens.
Maria was born at a bad time and into poverty, and did not have much luck in escaping it. It haunted her until the end: the traditional vigil was kept, unusually, in church, her tiny, bare house being quite inadequate for the reception of mourners. Automatically destined to be a village wife and mother, she received little education. But neither did she receive a dowry, and so she never married.
Instead, she devoted herself to her nephews, who are my children's third cousins, and was a constant and loving presence in my sons' lives as well. They came and went between her garden and their own, chattering away to Maria, and playing with her kittens, chickens and kids. When her nanny-goat butted four-year-old Alexander (he bears the scar in his eyebrow to this day) she was mortified, wringing her hands with guilt.
I bore my own burden of guilt with regard to Maria, and castigated myself regularly for my own discontents. My life, with its privileges, opportunities and comforts was, in a very real sense, a world away from Maria's.
Yet I never heard her complain, despite having so little: her pension, when she eventually got it, was minimal, and she used to earn a little bit of extra cash by selling her pieces of crochet to women who were too busy to make the d'oyleys and runners that their Domestic Goddess souls yearned for. She would sit outside with her cronies in the summer evenings, chatting and plying busily.
Women are the same the world over: we need conversations with other women, so Maria and I would often have what my mother used to call 'a good