![]() Breakfast splatters on the cobblestone lane. “But you will loff it,” I hear him call after me as I run out the door. Then they all look at me, smiling with anticipation as Panayiotis cuts another slice and stretches out a hand, offering it to me. Panayiotis and his customer beam-thrilled that the beautiful foreigner likes the stuff that hangs in the bloated carcass. He offers her a slice of the stuff, which she tastes without hesitation. I sense that breakfast could easily rise in my throat, but here is my always inquisitive mother, standing at the counter beside Panayiotis and his customer, watching curiously. Because there is the repulsiveness of its white, fleshy, container once very much alive. It is, I realize with disbelief, more than a little bit like the tangy scent of my beloved Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Even standing across the room I am hit full force by its odor, earthy and sharp. The author at a Greek wedding on the island, circa 1977 He removes it from its hook, foists it onto the counter, and scoops out some of the stuff inside. But when I see the shopkeeper stride to where it hangs, my eyes follow. Since we arrived at the market, I’ve avoided looking at the strange inside-out creature in the corner. He talks and laughs with the woman as he works, cutting into a round of cheese and removing a wedge that he weighs and then wraps in bright white paper. The shopkeeper, Panayiotis, is tall, maybe my mother’s age, with warm chestnut eyes. An elderly woman bustles in, leans against the counter, toothpick bobbing in her mouth, and places her order. Some days later, we return to the market for fresh eggs and a few provisions to round out our new pantry. ![]() He was probably the maker of that repulsive, delicious-smelling cheese. I spent a lot of time alone, reading and daydreaming, and soon I began to believe the implausible: that Homer’s one-eyed, cheesemaking giant, Polyphemus, probably lived on our island. I often kept a copy of The Children’s Homer tucked into my backpack. It’s both curious and grotesque and I can’t stop looking at it. It’s the skin of an animal, one that’s been turned inside out, scrubbed clean and white, and packed so full with some substance that it looks bizarrely rotund, like a caricature of the carcasses hanging in the butcher’s shop. And from that point on, the thing will become an obsession. I look around and see something hanging from the ceiling behind the counter, a thing that I will eventually forget until, decades later, I remember it, in that startling, How-did-I-forget-this? sort of way. ![]() The air smells musky, like a shadowy barn. A glass case holds massive rounds of cheese. Olives of various shapes, colors, and sizes float in barrels of dark, watery brine. In baskets that line the wall, I see mounds of lentils, yellow split peas, red onions, potatoes caked with dirt. ![]() Instead, the jars and cans stacked neatly on the shelves are packed with pickled octopus, tiny fish, grape leaves, squid. Now we’re in a village market and I’m searching the shelves for something I know well, perhaps a reassuring box of cereal emblazoned with a smiling tiger’s face, or a slender carton of Kraft macaroni with its bright orange powdered cheese that, I am sure, when combined with the cooked pasta, milk, and melting butter, will become something familiar. On this bright blue morning in late summer, we’ve just come from the butcher’s shop where the skinned carcasses of goats, lambs, and fowl hang from hooks that dangle from the ceiling. This is how our lives are-spontaneous, exhilarating, ever shifting. We’ll stay on this island for the next year, or maybe forever. There are no cars here, so we walk the pathways that wind through the village, past whitewashed stone houses with walled gardens brimming with bougainvillea, beneath lemon trees and aromatic jasmine, past cafés where old men sit with worry beads and tiny cups of Greek coffee. My mother and I have arrived on a small Greek island in the Myrtoan Sea, a place where the scent of warm pine needles and herbs growing wild on terraced hillsides mingles with fumes from the fishermen’s caïques and the stink of fishing nets drying in the sun. ![]()
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