This might be why in the village, seeing the Byzantine fortress of my papou’s childhood tales and our ancestral stone house for the first time, I always expected the tears to start flowing freely—but instead I felt the opposite, a warm hum of alignment between myself and a place that created the people who raised me. The orange trees were thick with bright fruit and the rose bushes were perfectly pruned into giant pink-and-yellow blooms. A bowl of dried whole walnuts sat beside an emptied ashtray, and heavy terra-cotta pots of sunflowers lined the ancient stone-walled lawn. It was nearly the same as my grandparents’ tidy garden back home, as if they were around the corner in their sun hats waiting for me to arrive.
I intended for my mom’s first time back here in decades to be a girls trip , a break from caring for her elderly mother—and it might have been if it wasn’t for all the translating and scavenger hunting for places we half-knew from family lore. But most of all, what this trip became for both of us was a new beginning, not the farewell I’d positioned it as.
This realization came in waves over the week: that instead of losing the culture and connection we worried about disappearing back home, we could pick it up and carry it for ourselves. My parents are kicking off retirement this year by spending a full month of it in Greece and returning to the village again. I, meanwhile, am enrolling in Greek classes at the Hellenic university a mile from my house in Boston, hopeful that my college-level Spanish will aid some conversation-level Greek—and plan to join my parents for part of their trip, perhaps in one of the five-star spas that have sprung up in town. Beyond this, we’re also reviving old recipes of my yia yia, who passed away six months after we returned from Greece; enough time to show her all the photos and souvenirs from our pilgrimage to her and my papou’s true home.
Bleary-eyed at the Athens airport before our early-morning flight home, my only tears of the trip finally sprang to my eyes. After spending days-long conversations rehashing stories and biographies about a generation that was fast slipping away from us, I didn’t want it all to end.
“What do you think Papou would say?” I asked my mom—one final question of so many levied at her that week—as we wheeled our bags toward the gates. “Oh, I don’t think he’d believe it,” she sighed. It had taken us a while ourselves, after all.
