Essay: Greek odyssey allows young people to reconnect with their familial roots
Ft. Worth Star-Telegram
By Emma Johnson
"Everyone in Greece has a village," my fiancé, Emmanuel, said. He was recounting stories about his childhood visits to that Mediterranean country, where we were embarking on a two-week trip to visit his ailing grandmother.
He explained to me that all Greeks -- even those several generations removed from their ancestors' village by love, work, studies or other ambitions -- were still deeply bound to those places. Most are tiny island towns where black and green grapes hang from the trellises, where families gather each winter to harvest the olives and where their yia yia (grandma) still heads down to the garden to pull potatoes.
I had grown up in a rural area of northern Illinois. My brothers and I spent many hours at the home of my grandparents, who for nearly 50 years have lived in a village of 600. For as long as I can remember, I was bursting to get out of those smothering communities where -- in my puffed-up and prolonged adolescence -- I complained that everyone dressed alike and thought alike and was not nearly as sophisticated as I fancied myself to be. Before I was 25, I had lived in three foreign countries and two other U.S. states, and I never gave a thought to moving back to Illinois.
But with rare exception, I never visit that Midwest village fewer than two times a year. If I come in July, we make whole meals of sweet corn (never more than a few hours off the stalk) at the huge walnut dining table where my mother and her three siblings sat and where countless dress patterns have been laid out, pinned to fabric and cut--including the burgundy brocade prom dress my grandma helped me sew.
As we eat one ear after another and toss the bare cobs onto a china platter in the middle of the table, Grandma and Grandpa share the local gossip, most of it culled from the office of the grain elevator where my grandpa and his buddies meet for coffee each morning at 7. In recent years, much of the talk has been about development of the town that started a decade ago when a Jordanian man named Mohammed invested in land near the state route. He built dozens of homes that sell for $200,000 to people who work in Chicago, 70 miles away. The population of Maple Park now exceeds 1,000.
My cheeks ached with laughter as Emmanuel told about visiting his grandparents in the village of Sfendili, about 30 miles outside Heraklion, the main city on the island of Crete.
Emmanuel, better known there as Manoli, the diminutive of his popular Greek name, would team up with his cousin Miltos in the one-cafe village in kamikaze attempts to cure their boredom. As the old folks napped during the sweltering summer afternoon, the 10-year-olds would tear around the tiny village inhabited by 30 people and their animals.
A cat snoozing on the cobblestone street in the sun got a water-balloon wake-up call. And chickens in the coop two doors down from the house ran headfirst into the stone walls after being fed bread soaked in the family's home-pressed wine.
Emmanuel was eager to visit his yia yia, as her health was failing three years after her husband died.
But there was more reason to visit Sfendili, because in several years it may cease to exist, a casualty of a long-disputed dam that would flood this and several nearby villages. The tiny 2-story stucco house where four generations of Emmanuel's father's family were raised -- a house promised to him and his siblings -- may be purchased by the government and buried underwater in a few years.
When we arrived, making our way up the single narrow street that runs uphill through the town, the old people who knew Manoli came out of their whitewashed homes with cats curling at their feet and greeted us as if they'd been waiting for him to come home. Most of the women wore black in the mourning custom, but their eyes were bright and joking, and they put their arms around my waist with a squeeze that surprised me in both its strength and its affection.
We made several trips to that village, one to hear family stories that Emmanuel had not gathered while growing up in Houston. We brought his father -- "Big Manoli" -- who helped translate the story of how Yia Yia became convinced that Emmanuel's grandfather was sincere in his intentions to marry her when he swam across a broad, rapid river because he had mistakenly thought he saw her tending sheep on a distant slope.
As I sipped Greek coffee and shelled walnuts from the freshly picked green casings that had been pounded open with a stone, I listened to stories of how she taught her husband to finesse the mule when plowing the fields and how she got peeved at him one time when he refused to hasten the sorting of the olives before an impending rain. So she took the whole bin of sifted fruit and dumped it on the ground.
Big Manoli also helped relate the story of how Emmanuel and I met, when he was a TV cameraman and I a newspaper reporter, and we were both covering a forest fire in northern Arizona. In Greek, Yia Yia told Emmanuel, "You told her, 'The fire's out, so let's start our own fire!'"
As I sat in that cool, dark, 500-year-old home listening to family stories, my eyes filled with tears. With no members of my immediate family putting down roots in our Illinois village, I wonder whether I will ever have reason to return there when I have children.
Will they know about the cattle, hog, bean and corn farm where their grandma was raised? Will they see where their mother had her first job at age 7, mowing three acres with a riding lawn mower for $5 (or half that if she shared the task with her brother Jacob, two years younger)? When they go to Greece, will they find the house that also served as the town cafe and grocery for many years and provided shelter to the local laborers when the winters chilled?
Two years ago, Emmanuel and I moved to New York City. And not long after we said "khairte" to Yia Yia and traveled to another Greek island, Emmanuel proposed. As we plan our life together, we often debate how long we will live here, whether we should buy an apartment in Manhattan or Queens or should move to a smaller city in a few years. With our respective villages slipping away, we wonder where we will find our home.
© Emma Johnson