This Land is Your Land

I have now been in Greece for three weeks. Three weeks that have, like the light of a comet, passed so quickly that there is little time for comprehension. Three weeks in which there have been moments that have passed as slowly as the night before Christmas when you are five years old. Either way, it’s been three weeks. Twenty-one days. Five hundred and four hours. For better or worse, faster or slower, Greece has been mine for that amount of time.

A banker who goes to Aegina to catch octopus for his friends on the weekends. A nun who lives alone atop Hydra, watching the worldly come and go at the port below, baking sweets for the handful of visitors she may have each month, quietly existing in a world unknown to most. A Greek cabdriver who tells you in perfect German that he has rocks in his heads for leaving Germany to come back to Greece, and replies to your comment that Greece is home with the wisdom of his father…home is wherever you are happiest. A man and his two sons(?), nephews (?) who spend every day slow roasting pork and chicken to make gyros and who for 1.35 euros will provide you with dinner and a few new words of Greek. The rich who sit in cafes in their designer clothes and sip frappes. The poor who sit with their tin cans on the sidewalks of Syntagma and sell their deformities for mere cents to the unseeing eyes of shoppers buying hundred euro shoes. The prejudiced comments about Albanian refugees spoken in loud whispers on crowded buses. The bowl of scraps set outside the door for the stray dogs that roam the city. The farmer at the Friday morning market who slips an extra peach into your bag as a gift. The teacher who invites you to her home for dinner and calls all the people she knows who are your age so that you might have someone to hang out with. The housemates who laugh with you, yell with you, eat with you, and sit quietly with you while you simultaneously wonder what you are doing here and how you got so lucky as to be here. Sapphire water. The smell of pine. Light as you have never seen it before, brighter, more illuminating. This is my Greece.

How would someone who had only been in America for three weeks see it?
What, I wonder, is my America?