Happy Valentine's Day! ----- At this very moment, I am enjoying Greek yogurt with honey and an iced Nescafe frappe. After my mother came home last weekend, she came with her suitcase full of foods that we miss from Greece. The frappe is completely different from American frappucinos. You take some instant Nescafe, mix in some water and sugar, add more water, milk and ice to create a coffee drink that to me, is paradise. I had bought a huge can last summer, thinking it would last a long time, but I ran out sometime in November--which made me buy Nescafe at Wal-Mart. I thought the two would taste the same, but the Greek Nescafe is far superior to it's Mexican counterpart. It's smoother and simultaneously stronger. So I asked my mother to pick up a can if she had a chance while she was in Crete. When she got home last weekend, she was understandably spent. Twenty hours on planes doesn't look good on anyone, and in addition to my aunt's passing last Tuesday, the grief had not yet settled. The second she got off the plane, she just held onto me for what seemed like minutes and I could feel something in her relax--which scared the hell out of me, knowing how tightly she was wound. When we got home, I made an emergency trip to Dion's to pick up some sandwiches for the family. Nothing makes you more hungry than sadness. That might just be me though:) So I got home and my mom had unpacked a can of Nescafe for me--I was completely overjoyed because now I can enjoy my early mornings that much more. Then she reached into the bag and produced another can. And another. And another. And another. My cousins sent me fifteen cans of Nescafe. This act, not to take anything away from the death of my aunt, made me more sad and "homesick" than anything else that week. For having such barriers between us, I know that my cousins and I are so very similar in so many ways. I miss them so terribly right now. I wish I could have been over there, recounting my Thea Vasso with laughing, stories, and my other aunts impersonations of her. A wake, of sorts. They miss me too, making it apparent that they are thinking of me, showing by sending countless cans of instant coffee that they know I miss. Such a trivial item, but such a huge gesture. My mom recounted when she was shopping for them with my cousins--one, in particular, couldn't stop laughing at imagining my face when I got all of this instant coffee. It's always been hard to have such a geographically distant family. I am so much more closely bound to my Greek family and so many more of my personality quirks are so definitely Greek in nature that I wish I could spend so many more days, months, and hours with them. I feel like I constantly miss births, weddings, life events that it sometimes makes me so profoundly sad it takes my breath away. I also know that it makes the moments together that much more sweet--the fact that one of my mother's sisters is now gone is a ripple effect that you never quite see until after the fact. Many of my values are so stereotypically American, I know that I could never be a good Greek housewife. My never-ending wanderlust, my quest for the best self, my competitive nature can all be traced through my father's family. Yet that family bond that I feel so strongly on my mother's side is so far away from my father's reality that it is, at times, a laughably strange dichotomy. It's funny. I appreciate my father, but I understand my mother. |
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