Free Mnemonic by Theresa Kishkan

the Peloponnese, was the Acrocorinth with its remains of temples and fortifications. There was an important sanctuary to Demeter and Kore there; I’d studied their cult and it was glorious to be so near a site associated with two faces of womanhood — the mother and the maiden. The sun, even early, was warm.
    My Greek friends came by to offer me breakfast on the deck of the ferry — they pulled cheese and apples from their rucksacks (they’d slept on the deck, under the stars), provided small slugs from a flask of Metaxa, and little cups of coffee they brought from the ship’s cafeteria. The previous night they’d surprised me by quoting poetry — Yannis Ritsos — and I asked what poems they had for a morning sail through the Isthmus of Corinth:
    The harbor is old, I can’t wait any longer
    for the friend who left for the island of pine trees
    for the friend who left for the island of plane trees . . . 1
    I recognized Seferis. “Now say it in Greek,” I asked. One of them continued the poem:
    Î¤' ἀστρα της νύχτας με γυρίζουν στην προσδοκία
    Ï„ου Οδυσσέα για τους νεκρούς μες στ' ασφοδίλια
    (“The night’s stars take me back to the anticipation / of Odysseus waiting for the dead among the asphodels . . . ”). 2 I wanted such ease of transport, between London and Athens, Greek and English, those days of Odysseus among the asphodels and myself on the deck of a ferry sailing for Piraeus.
    Travelling through Spain and France, I’d grown to love the sight of olive trees. How beautiful they were, the gnarled trunks of the old ones, and the grey-green leaves trembling as the train passed. I knew from my Classical Studies courses that olive trees were sacred to Athena, that the first olive tree was a result of her striking her spear into the soil of the area which became her city, Athens, and that the original tree still grew there.
    I’d also grown to love olive oil in my very early twenties, which is the time I am writing of — though it was something I’d never had at home. Reading Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson had made me realize that a world of food waited, just as a world of other wonders did, and it made me impatient for my life to begin. That was one reason I was heading to Crete. I was hopeful that all the things I’d wanted and wished for in Victoria and which hadn’t materialized — love (my friends were all pairing up and the men I wanted never noticed me), a table laden with figs, wine and fine cheeses, herbs picked from the land itself, a sense of myself as a writer in my own right, with passion and purpose — were possible here.
    Who knows why the young attach such yearning to places other than home, and take to the skies, the seas, the mountains of the world? In those years (and I dare say in these years as well), they were abroad with their rucksacks, their passports, clutching well-worn copies of Europe on Ten Dollars a Day , watched by those who’d done the whole thing a decade earlier on five dollars a day. I had none of those books — only Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi , Lawrence Durrell’s Reflections on a Marine Venus , and my beloved copy of The Odyssey , in Robert Fitzgerald’s wonderful translation. In these books, there were olive trees, and lamb bathed with oil grilling on open fires. I thought I could travel the way my heroes did, with luck and the blessing of the gods.
    Two Americans began a conversation with me; they wanted to know where I was going. After a private consultation with each other and their guidebook, they wondered if they could tag along to Crete. My Greek friends helped us to figure out the boat connection to Herakleion. This gave us a day in