Author Archives: Diana Farr Louis

“Does your life feel like a microcosm of what’s going on in the greater world? That everything that could go wrong is going wrong? Nothing as dramatic or appalling as being targeted by missiles fired from the Black Sea, but sliding or lurching out of control? I admit that mishaps can become magnified as one […]

“Looking back over all that has happened since the 4th of June, 1972, it seems I was extraordinarily fortunate in that roll of the dice that sent me here. It didn’t look like it at the time, since the whole chain of events started with a near fatal car accident that landed me in the Mass […]

“The storm is called ‘Elpida,’ or Hope, but does it bring hope with it? Hope that our lemon tree on Andros will not suffer frostbite; hope for all the citrus groves in Greece—for this is a countrywide phenomenon, hitting even Crete; hope for the farmers and market gardeners who pray their produce will not be […]

“As the summer drew on, we became aware that we were living in a bubble, somehow protected from the disasters that seemed to be striking most parts of the world. Besides the unstoppable fires in the West of the US and Canada, floods were killing people and tearing towns in half in Germany, while a […]

“Dearest Friends and Rellies, sorry it’s been so long since you last heard from me, but since the lockdown ended on May 14, exactly a month ago as I write this, I’ve had no wish nor time to sit at the laptop composing epistles or even jotting a quickie update.”—Diana Farr Louis Eating Well Is […]

“Didi found me a small pension in Calenzana, a nearby village notorious for being a center of the Union Corse and the white slave trade. ‘How can you go there on your own,’ friends would exclaim. ‘You’ll be abducted by your straight blonde hair and whisked off to Saudi Arabia!’”—Diana Farr Louis Eating Well Is […]

“The journey I’m about to describe took place a few years ago, but it could well have happened four or five decades ago. We seemed to travel back in time as we chugged around the Cyclades in an aged steamer. If you have not lived here among the Greeks, you probably don’t know the expression […]

“I also remember the tales of my mother-in-law, my first husband’s mother. Dora Lada, known to the family as Dodo, was born in 1900. She brought up her two children on her own, after her husband died of something preventable not long after the Stock Market crash of ’29. Dodo did not resemble the eponymous […]

“Maroussi would be an idyll that lasted almost two decades. I would meet the rest of my neighbors, who included a quintet of wonderfully eccentric older ladies, Greek, English, and Maltese; an academician/professor of philosophy; the mothers—as stout as one of the house’s heirloom wardrobes—of boys who would become Duff’s pals; an English woman my […]

“Then, I might stare at the laptop screen for a few minutes until I remember a phone call that must be made. Today—and this is five days after I started this piece—we have to go to the spring (15 minutes away) to fill up our water containers, and down to the port (15 minutes in […]