Free Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance by Robert Crisp Page B

life with weeds or with the wild flowers I had moved in and whose seeds, I hoped, were now lying there dormant?
    But the cycle of productivity did not pass me by. This was tomato time in southern Greece, and I lived in the heart of tomato country. The fields, the roads, the table tops overflowed with plump redness. Aubergines and melons are contemporaries of the tomato and I had only to walk up to the bus stop and back to collect red, purple and golden armfuls of each from every farm I passed. It is a sort of Greek equivalent of keeping up with the Joneses.
    My own tomatoes and aubergines in the garden by the well were now ripening, and if I got there before the scores of hens which Janni, in a misguided moment, had let loose to keep the insects down in his cotton fields, I would soon be able to cut down on those long and dusty walks to the bus stop. The mulberries had come and gone – to be retained briefly in two jars of home-made mulberry jam – but in another week or two, the figs would be ready to eat and before the last fig was picked I would be helping myself to the bunches of grapes that lined my pathway home from practically any direction. The invitation to do so had already been extended. And accepted. Then, in September and October, came the wine-pressing. This was all done with the feet around there. I had, of course, made my arrangements to participate in the labour and the fruits thereof, and it may be of some comfort to readers to know that wines from this part of Greece were not exported.
    When I raised my head from the evening table… over the tall heads of my thistles, the green promise of fig and vine, olive and orange, I lifted my eyes to the constant fulfilment of one of the loveliest panoramas of sea, mountain and sky in all Peloponnese – and that means in all the world. It was a feast to assuage any sort of hunger.

Chapter 11
Operation Whitewash
    It sounded a pretty good idea at the time. I had dropped in for a chat and a bowl of rice pudding (always available) at the house of Demetrios up the road. A husky stranger in the living room was introduced as Gregorice from Areopolis – a town on the other side of the mountains. “He did all the white-washing of this house and the outbuildings,” my host told me.
    I pricked up my ears. For weeks I had been considering the proposition of making my rain and smoke blackened upstairs house look a little brighter and cleaner, but I had postponed action for the simple reason that I was reluctant to begin a mammoth brushwork task that I would have to finish once I started. It was too binding a commitment for my summer philosophy.
    Also, getting the whitewash from Gythion to my house was a major logistical problem that I did not want to have to resolve.
    â€œYou are a whitewasher?” I inquired politely in my basic Greek.
    Gregorice, I thought, looked a trifle put out. He replied emphatically, but as far as I was concerned, incomprehensibly. After much to-ing and fro-ing of words and gestures, I was made to understand that he was an engineer not a whitewasher, but he was also the best whitewasher in southern Greece.
    â€œI do not want an engineer,” I pointed out, “but I do want to have my house whitewashed. Unhappily, I do not have enough money to pay for the best whitewasher in all of Greece.”
    I could see from Gregorice’s expression that he now recognised me as a foreigner of considerablediscernment.
    â€œMoney?” he scoffed. “You are a friend. How big is your house?”
    I quoted so many metres this way and that way and upwards.
    â€œ
Po, po, po
,” he waved a hand in contemptuous dismissal. “It is not much bigger than a chicken house.”
    I took this opportunity to mention that I had a chicken house too, that would be greatly improved by a little of his technical skill.
    â€œOn Sunday,” he said, “I go to Ageranos for lunch. I will stop on the way and do your house. You