“The neighborhood around Boulevard Haussman was residential and stuffy, staid apartment houses with few shop windows to peer into. But before long I found myself in front of a façade masked with heavy…

“It all began on a tennis court in the late 1980s. I was co-editing a magazine for a Greek hotel chain and, since we were writing most of the articles ourselves under pseudonyms,…

“On the day we left Andros in mid-October, I was convinced no olives would be clinging to the trees two weeks later. They were prematurely ripe, already littering the ground—wrinkled as raisins, hard…

“May Days were a new concept to me. As an American, I always thought of Labor Day as an end-of-summer holiday, not a rite of spring. In Paris, it meant little old ladies…

“Joy-of-the-People (literal transliteration of my Greek husband’s name, Harilaos) and I discovered the little island by accident back in 1975. Horrified by the rats slinking around taverna tables in the port of Kalymnos,…

“I remember our first olive crop. It must have been about ten years ago. We’d been so excited, stripping the fruit from our Kalamata and Amphissa trees. We filled several shopping bags and…

“Although Dad and I were the only ones left in our big house on Long Island, we had plenty of people to look after us. One was Marie, the cook from Alsace. Another…

“If worst comes to worst, I can always become one of those little old ladies who sell herbs on the sidewalk near the farmers’ markets or in downtown Athens. All of the herbs…

“No it’s not a type of chocolate; it’s Greece’s own brand of caviar: bottargo, slightly salted and barely dried gray mullet roe, fished from the lagoons on this country’s west coast in late summer.…

“It was a bright afternoon in early September. Before entering the monastery church of Aghios Nikolaos above the Old Harbor, my son and I posed for the camera. In the photo, both of…