Better Homes and Alleys

There is an alley that runs beside our house.   It connects the road into the lower village with the street we face.  It also serves as a shortcut to the bakery in the morning and as a thoroughfare for cats at night.  The village is old, but the alley way looks positively ancient, with hand forged iron hitching rings still imbedded in the plastered stone walls, where people once tethered horses and donkeys.

Kathy has been on a mission to ‘landscape’ it with ornamental plants, cooking herbs, and a small table and chairs, so we could have a little outdoor space where we could cook out, eat, play cards, or watch television downloads from the laptop in the evening.  After a tedious day of home improvement shopping, lugging plants and potting soil up from the parking lot, and arranging everything ‘just so’ in the alley, a nicely dressed man passing by in the street offered Kathy a polite, “Callie sperra.”  When he reached the alley, he surveyed the improvements, and exclaimed an enthusiastic, “Bravo!”

Mission accomplished.

Yesterday in Karlovasi, I bought a little charcoal grill, then headed to the butcher shop for chicken leg quarters and sausage.  I grilled it all in the alley with some zucchini for dinner, then we walked about 40 yards to the store for ice cream, and back home for our evening fix of American television.  As Tony Soprano emerged from the Holland Tunnel and rolled through the toll gate, music for the lead-in trailer comes up, and as Tony drives past the gritty landscape of the Jersey Turnpike, I do a little mental arithmetic and figure it’s about 3:00 PM back in Mayport.  Tony glides through his neighborhood and rolls up into his driveway, exactly the way Homer Simpson does it, and everyone it seems, is at home.  I imagine our cat lolling in the shade of the pergola, or the dog sprawled out on the cool tiled floor of Jessica’s house. Tony Soprano is standing in his kitchen in Elizabeth New Jersey, Homer Simpson is slumped back on his couch in Springfield, God is in his Heaven, and everything on Planet Earth is exactly as it should be.  We are at home in Vourliotes, and life is sweet!

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

photos by Newell