The turquoise water beckoned, and with a joyous yell, the sun-kissed boy plunged into the sea. He was a natural, his small body gliding effortlessly through the waves. “You’ll know him when you see him,” the landlady’s daughter had told me. This boy, along with his brother, lived in the larger town nearby but attended school here. Later, I learned that their grandmother was our neighbor, hence the local school. My partner, slightly alarmed, watched the boy disappear into the water. Our own children, hesitant to follow, were stopped by their father. “They can’t swim as well as you,” he said to the boy, who we were quickly beginning to see as a local guide and friend. “Ah,” the boy replied, a hint of surprise in his voice, “let’s go fishing then.” My partner chuckled; our kids weren’t fishermen either. “They don’t know how to fish?” The boy’s incredulity was almost a rebuke. “What kind of education have you given these children? What kind of father are you? Don’t you want them to survive?” “They’re city kids,” my partner explained. “What’s a city?” the blond boy asked, his curiosity piqued.
It was our fifth day in the coastal town we had decided to call home. A 600-kilometer journey separated us from our comfortable city life – complete with convenient amenities, manageable distances, and family living just minutes away. It had been almost a year since a small fire damaged our newly renovated apartment. The fire itself was relatively minor, but the repairs kept us out of our home for five long months. I suppose it was during that time we learned that a school year flies by, that we could survive without all our possessions, and that no matter what we did, when our children were hungry or tired, they became unbearable.
We returned to our apartment in the spring, it was beautiful, yet the desire to leave was already bubbling within us. The idea of a year by the sea, a family fantasy, was the first to surface. Our children spoke of two years, and my partner jokingly suggested “forever”. I started watching “The Durrells” with my children, in English with subtitles, all four seasons before August ended. We booked the house without seeing it, and at the end of June, my partner set off to scout the area while I stayed in the city with the children, juggling the end of school year, the school’s farewell party, the baking contest, and the slumber party. Because, of course, “If we’re not going to be at this school or in this city next year, Mom, we need to have the party before we leave.” “Go ahead, girls,” I said. “You’ll always find lipstick to smear, a cheap eye shadow palette to mess up your makeup with, and enough glitter (it’s banned to manufacture, not to use) to leave traces on the sheets, sofas, and towels.” And so, I moved to a house I’d only seen in photos, in a village I’d never visited. Some things were as I had imagined; others were not. The journey felt shorter, the village seemed less charming and less pedestrian-friendly.
My secret plan was borrowed from Charmian Clift, an Australian writer who moved from London to Greece with her family – writer George Johnston and their two children (their third was born in Hydra). Clift wrote two books about their experience: “Siren’s Song” and “Lotus Seekers”. Here is Clift’s phrase that I’ve adopted as my mantra: “I have a theory, which I dare not examine too closely, that if I neglect everything just a little, I will achieve nearly everything.” Clift took her own life four years after returning from Greece, succumbing to alcohol and barbiturates. Her husband was about to publish a novel that detailed infidelities on the island. I have taken precautions – my partner is not a writer.
My other plan was to write: a slightly more neglected life that would allow me to include “writing a novel” (a real one, as some people sarcastically or innocently tell me) in that “almost everything.” What makes my children the happiest brings us parents the greatest anxiety: there’s no dining room. The summer I spent with the children constantly at home, organizing meals, fulfilling their needs, and managing existential anxieties, made me suspicious: perhaps I had set a deadly trap for myself, and I was leaping over it with the same grace as the boy fisherman on the beach. “But how good it felt to be alive and lying in the sun; how fantastic and free it was to launch yourself from the highest rock on the edge of the cave.”
On Saturday, we saw crabs and swam surrounded by fish.
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