The storm is coming

 

It’s Sunday morning, 6 November, and we’re preparing for a storm – though the sun is still warm and bright. For weeks we’ve woken to perfect blue skies and calm but now dark grey clouds are gathering and a restless wind blowing from the south. 

A thunderstorm is always hard for Lisa so I’ve given her an extra-nice breakfast. There’s a comfortable, dry space in the woodshed for Fishbags the cat. As for the other cat - the one that shows up several times a day meowing for food, however determined I am not to have a second cat - it will fend for itself, I'm sure. That one is 'The Cat Formerly Known as Girlfriend' - the one that acted like Fishbags' girlfriend, until its anatomy developed. I'm not sure if they'll still share the space in the woodshed.

In summer I remove some of the windows to let the wind blow through the house, and replace them with wire mesh screens; yesterday seemed a good time to put the windows back on. We rearranged the kitchen furniture – my furniture is always rearranged with the seasons – to bring in a second couch from outside, an old bed piled up with cushions. I covered the big old couch outside with a tarpaulin.

There was a strange day or two of rain in August and a day in mid-October, but otherwise the ground hasn’t been soaked for many months. The island’s roaming goats have been suffering with nothing fresh to eat; in a half hour’s walk from home we see half a dozen dead or dying. 

Olives suffer from the late rain too – they like a good soaking in October. This week I gathered them in from my two trees. It seemed a little early, and others had firmly told me ‘Not before the rain!’ but Antonis, visiting with some olive oil, said they were ready for alati, salt; he meant brine, and explained how to test the saltiness of the water by seeing if a fresh egg just rises to the top. I spent an hour or two later pruning the olive trees, then decided to open the 20-litre barrel of attempted wine from this summer’s grapes. Excitingly, it smelled and tasted good! Still a little fizzy and cloudy, but certainly more like wine than vinegar.

I’ve been watering my garden every few days; I’m still picking a tomato or two every day from my plants, and there’s rocket, the spinach is coming back, and the radish seedlings are coming up. I’ve been grabbing a handful of dates from the palm every day; they have big stones, but the taste of fresh dates for free is a sweet treat. I’ve been planting, thinning out seedlings, digging new beds, heartened that gradually the garden is yielding more. The jury's still out on whether the avocado tree will survive.

Some delicious flavours of the new season came this week on Dimitris’ truck: seskoula or chard, boiled and served with a squeeze of fragrant local lemon, as well as chopped garlic and olive oil; a feast with potatoes, and salt-cured fish, and feta, and just-ripe mandarins. Dinner tasted great with retsina, but we also ordered some red wine, white wine and souma from Embona in Rhodes for the winter.

During September and into October, if you wanted to go out for dinner, it was hard to get a table in Livadia. Now, only a couple of restaurants remain open. The kafeneio in Megalo Horio closed its outdoor terrace, and has a cosier, locals’ feel; food is available but might have to wait until the card game is over. The island is quiet, with fewer cars around. The bus stops in mid-afternoon.

On the dry paths high on the hillsides we’ve seen mauve colchicums, a few mauve crocuses and a tiny delicate autumn narcissus. I’ve heard melodious birdsong while sitting at my desk with the door open to the garden. We’ve seen eagles circling in the sky, kestrels and owls taking off. The moon and stars have been very bright at night.

The sunshine at this time of year has lost the burning heat of summer and is easier to enjoy; I’ve found it impossible to stay indoors too long, when the temperature is so good for walking. The late afternoon light is radiant, golden. Walking back from a walk in the warm dusk under a bright moon, you hear the peep of the scops owl.

Though many beaches are in shadow by mid-afternoon, the sea has been clear, warm and calm, ideal for snorkelling. At Eristos, for the first time, I saw small calamari very close to the surface; I’ve watched pearly razorfish with their soft, delicate pink and green colouring, pottering around the seabed alone. A germanos, spotting me, raised all the spines along its back, its mouth an ‘o’; an octopus hid motionless in a little cave, disguised by making its head as spiky and mottled as the rock.

Off the beach near my house, thornback rays have been gliding elegantly across the seabed with their wings billowing to either side and their long, pointed tails. I’ve been close enough to see the subdued gold under the mostly greyish brown, the little point of its ‘nose’ feeling its way in the sand, the back flipper guiding. A few times I’ve seen flat little flounders crowding the ray’s tail as it forages in the sand; and a white trevally, striped with yellow, hovering directly over it, picking at it. Bizarrely, when a ray took off and sped away at a hand’s height above the seabed, the fish went in seemingly hot pursuit, hovering either above or below the ray. Funny fish behaviour.

And still once or twice in late October I’ve come back from the beach exhilarated and showered off under the hosepipe in the back garden, looking over red and pink flowers and through bright green palm leaves to the blue sea and headland beyond.

Flies and damp evenings heralded the change in the weather. Now the wind is beginning to get up again, tossing the bougainvillaea around. A crow caws. The thunder begins, and gets louder, the sky gets darker… The first drops of rain are pattering.