Found Things

"In Memory of Happier Times..." she says, surprising me, crinkling her chin and stretching her mouth in mild disapproving amusement. We are sitting on the veranda, the Saronic Sea is at its bluest and most transparent and I've just shown her my little Greek book with our wild green gathering expeditions, all four of which conclude at her doorstep, with me, holding bags of foraged greens, unnecessarily triumphant. She has been leafing through it, noticing the "posterized" picture of herself playing the piano and missing the other one on the veranda. I show it to her. She says nothing but flattens her chin and pulls her mouth in a straight line. I press the green tip of my pen on the empty space below the drawing and write: "To my darling mom!" Then I ask her, "What else shall I write?" "In memory of happier times," she replies expressionless. [...] ''Found Things'' is a mosaic of seemingly unrelated subjects written in a style and form that is as unusual as the concurrence of the stories which it narrates. It is a record of four expeditions in the hills of the Greek Argolid to gather wild greens and a record of the decline of the writer's mother. It is about time, the love of place, about wildness, learning and losing.