Greek Hillside

The cicadas are the loudest thing for miles.

A pulsing, electric, relentless song that rises from every bush and tree and stone wall. Not unpleasant. After a while, it becomes the texture of the afternoon. The sound of heat made audible. The soundtrack of a Greek hillside in summer, exactly the same as it sounded two thousand years ago.

You are sitting under an olive tree. An old one. Centuries old, possibly. Its trunk has twisted into a shape that does not seem possible for wood. Spiraled, hollowed, scarred, and somehow still vigorous. The leaves are silver-green and they catch the breeze in a way that makes the whole canopy shimmer, flashing silver, then green, then silver again.

The shade is not deep. These are not broad, dark trees. The shade is dappled. Light comes through the leaves in moving coins of gold on the dry grass beneath you. Your skin is warm where the sun finds it, cool where the shadow covers you. The temperature shifts as the breeze moves the leaves, a constant, gentle alternation between warmth and shade.

The sea is visible. Far below, at the bottom of the hill, through terraces of stone walls and more olive trees and the rooftops of a small white village. The Aegean. Blue in a way that seems excessive. Blue that looks painted. But it is the real colour. The deep, mineral blue of a sea that has been sailed by every civilization that mattered, and the sunlight today is strong enough to show every shade of it.

The air smells of wild thyme. You are probably sitting on some. It grows everywhere here, between the stones, in the cracks of the walls, releasing its scent when the sun heats it or when your foot brushes it. Thyme and dry grass and the faint salt of the sea below.

A goat bell clinks in the distance. The most Greek of all sounds. A single, flat note, repeating every few seconds as the goat moves along a terrace somewhere out of sight. The bell is old. The sound is old. The goat, and her ancestors, have been walking this hillside since before Homer.

Your eyes close. Not to sleep. To better feel the warmth on your eyelids. The breeze on your forearms. The dry grass under your palms. Midday in Greece is not a time for doing. It is a time for being. The rest of the world calls it a siesta. The Greeks call it common sense.

A lizard appears on the stone wall beside you. Small, fast, then perfectly still. It flattens itself against the warm stone, absorbing heat through its belly, watching you with one dark eye. You watch each other. Two creatures, both basking, both warm, both doing exactly nothing.

Somewhere below, in the village, a shutter closes. A door opens. Someone is doing something, slowly. There is no urgency here. The olives will ripen when they ripen. The sea will be blue tomorrow too. And the cicadas will sing until the sun goes down, and then the silence will come, and that will be beautiful too.

Let the warmth soak into your bones. Let the cicadas carry your thoughts away.

...