“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,…

“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…

“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…

“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…

“I’d been ferreting out recipes in the medieval inner town, founded by the Venetians in the 13th century and still full of atmosphere. Here, Latin emblems or Ottoman inscriptions crown massive wooden doors…

“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,…