An Open Letter of Gratitude to Greece

Dear Motherland:

Thank you for your sizzling sun and unapologetic winds. Thank you for your complicated curvy streets and narrow passages. Thank you for your complex and diverse fragrances of honeysuckle, jasmine, roses, spice, food, compost and exhaust.

Thank you for your diverse history with layers (literally) upon layers of architecture, revealing histories, peoples, conflicts, and stories, ancient and modern. Stacked intricately. Century upon century. Decade upon decade.

Thank you for still forcing cracks and crevices to push up olive trees, pomegranates, apricots, pears, grape vines, basil, thyme. Gratitude for edging your lands with aloe and cactus and I thank you for graciously allowing people to take what they need, and sometimes more than they need.

Thank you for the deep blue sea of the Aegean and the Ionian with all the contours and ridges and the changing hues of blues: turquoise and almost emerald and sometimes sapphire. They are colours that even with description don’t do justice to the sight of the waters.

Thank you for your friendly, passionate, and emotional people and the hospitality that exudes quite naturally from their hearts and your land.

I see that you’ve been mistreated—wars, poverty, difficult leadership, challenges. I’m sorry for that. However, it speaks volumes that in spite of all the challenges you still offer up all these beautiful things every time I find myself winding through your hills and mountains, cliffs and bluffs, beaches, seas, lakes, rivers, hamlets, villages, towns, and cities on spiraling roads through this country.

And for that generosity, I give you a final thank you as I say goodbye for one more year.

As always, thank you for reading lovelies.