Pictures of Ano Mera, Mykonos

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—6/6/11—Years ago, when a favorite aunt of mine suddenly died, her sisters were astonished to find her cupboards filled with new linens, handguns and never-worn shoes—hundreds of pairs of tiny size 6AA pumps that none of us could squeeze into.

It made the women in the family feel like Cinderella’s clod-hopping stepsisters, but it spurred us all into putting our own cupboards in order: if “you are what you collect,” what were we to make of this mysterious relative who’d amassed towels, Saturday Night Specials and shoes she’d never wear? We went home and peered uneasily into our own dark hoardings to see what they said about us.

My mother came up with reams of letters, cookbooks and coat hangers; her elder sister rented a bonded warehouse; my own seemingly innocent cupboards contained mainly boxes and boxes of old photographs, dating from my photographer-grandfather’s time, down to the present. Both here and in Atlanta, I seem to be a consistent pack-rat of not-so-graven images, and my past, I find, must be left long enough in the fixer if I am to retain and decipher it at all.

But a stranger, coming upon these snapshots of goats, ship-like monasteries and country weddings, would make little sense of it all: I am afraid the soundtrack for this silent movie of mine will die with the photographers.

One box of photos that seems to end up in a cupboard no matter where I am is labeled “Pictures of Ano Mera, Mykonos,” and contains a rapidly fading hodgepodge of stills shot between 1977 and 1981.

The box is a little rickety from being pulled down from high, damp shelves, and the photographs are pocked with fingerprints and scarred from being wrenched out of various family and wedding albums. When families dissolve, photographs, too, often divorce and go off to lead more independent lives in folders or boxes. And whereas albums may be shared with strangers (“Here we are collecting escargots in 1980 . . . ”), folders and boxes are pulled down, emptied and perused for more private audiences.

Pictures of Ano Mera have been saved to help me make sense of a decade, and the hard lessons I learned living through it.

When a husband departs, or a woman closes up a carefully tended home, precipitously; when the house on the hill is finally rented to strangers, and the locks are changed, photographs may be the only path back to an exploded reality one person alone remembers.

Photographs are the only space and time where the table in Ano Mera is still set, the wall still hung with paintings, the steffana-box* still filled, the front garden still blue with irises.

And though I suppose looking at old wedding pictures or pictures from springs and summers of seven years ago may seem morbid to some—to those who say one mustn’t look back, to those intimidated by loss, age or transition—I disagree. I take the box down to review the richness of life—like someone reading poetry in braille until the dots are worn away and the poem is learnt by heart.

I came to the highland village of Ano Mera as a bride from the First World—a sort of astronaut who fell to earth in a culture that would alter me as totally as Alice was by Wonderland.

The first photographs from Ano Mera show a girl in a Mexican wedding dress and white ballet shoes (imagine what Ano Merites thought of that nuptial get-up . . . ) going through the motions of a wedding ceremony in a foreign tongue and looking like an American high-school sophomore daydreaming in Latin class.

There follow photos of the unheated stone house, where clothes and sheets were washed “by foot” in the bathtub, and where one was likely to wake in summer to the sight of a donkey’s head hanging through the bedroom window like a continuation of one’s surreal dreams.

But the photographs exclude what was purely “anecdotal” and, in this, they faithfully render what daily life was like in that Greek village. Where prose may fib and recall the highlights, the jokes—the day 90-kilo Taroula fell down two flights of monastery stairs and suffered not a bruise; the time the grammar school teacher was discovered in the husband’s armoire, etc.—photographs recall the ordinary texture of Ano Mera, the rituals, the interiors, the faces of the villagers, the changing colors of the fields.

I study the images to avoid forgetting what I learned in Ano Mera, the lessons—less painful than uncomfortable—in what one can do without if one must, what one can survive if one has to, and what one can find within oneself, given the chance. And for a woman reared like the main character in “The Princess On the Pea,” Third World lessons in cold, discomfort, sensory deprivation and courage were invaluable.

Near the end of the Ano Mera series is a photograph of a woman holding a newborn kid, umbilicus barely cut. It was one of an entire little flock of surefooted babies in my backyard in the spring of 1980.

Now I look at this particular picture and know a lot you don’t. I know, for example, that this is a picture of a woman who can survive a wet, cold and lonely Greek island winter in a house that leaks in every room. This is also a picture of a woman who can set a broken arm, lug groceries up a two-mile hill in sleet and rain, hold her own in a village where she is the sole foreigner, cook just about anything but angel food cake on a one-burner hot-plate, and not die of boredom and anger without friends, books, films, magazines, convenience foods, transportation, and the milk of human kindness.

This picture of the woman holding the goat is a picture of a woman who learned to survive in Ano Mera, learned to love it there, and then learned, at last, that in order to keep growing, she would have to get out, and fast. (I closed up the house, packed up the pictures, and left.)

Perhaps you have other ways of learning, of running the truth in situations to earth; I study photographs, and store them up like a library-in-progress, hoping I’ll have time to read them properly before they fade, or fall into the hands of relatives who will see them as just so many size-6AA shoes.

*Steffana-box: an ornate wooden container, usually hung above a marital bed, containing the “wedding crowns,” usually of orange blossom and seed-pearls—the steffana—central to a Greek Orthodox wedding ceremony.

This column, excerpted from my paired memoirs, Greek Unorthodox: Band à Part & A Farewell To Ikaros, (2005, Cosmos Publishing, www.GreeceInPrint.com), was first published in July of 1984.