My family and I had taken a holiday to Naxos, Greece. That first morning I stepped out of the rented apartment to find a grocery store, something for breakfast.
It was already warm at nine in the morning. The air carried the salt-and-mineral smell of the sea mixed with something sweet—jasmine, maybe, or oleander blooming somewhere out of sight. I stopped walking. Not deliberately. My feet just stopped, the way you halt mid-sentence when something catches you off guard.
The light was different here: hard, clean, making every surface vivid. The white plaster walls along the promenade were almost painful to look at, blazing against a deep blue sky. I had to squint my eyes.
I walked slowly. The flagstones under my sandals were already warm, and I could feel the heat pressing through the soles.The houses along the promenade were immaculate, low-roofed and thick-walled in the old style, their plaster tinted in faded pastels—a terracotta here, a dusty blue there. Each had a small garden enclosed by a low stonewall, dense with life. Terracotta pots crowded the steps and ledges, overflowing with geraniums so pink they looked artificial.
One garden stopped me. A small wooden pergola stood in it, and a grapevine had consumed it, twisting up the posts and across the lattice until the whole structure had become a canopy of broad leaves. Through the gaps hung clusters of grapes, dusty gold-brown, translucent where the morning sun struck them. A few had split from their own ripeness, and I caught a faint winy sweetness in the air.
Along the white wall to the left of the pergola, tomato plants had been trained up a simple frame of canes and twine. They had grown enormous in that sun, and the tomatoes were almost obscene in their redness—deep, uneven, cracked at the shoulders, nothing like the uniform spheres in a supermarket.
The leaves gave off that sharp green smell you only get when you brush against a tomato plant in full heat. I was breathing slowly, deliberately, tasting the air as much as smelling it.
I was standing in the heat. I heard the clink of a coffee cup on a saucer from a terrace above me. I felt the sun on the back of my neck. Nothing else.