Two decades ago, my uncle built a small two bedroom
house on some land that my family owns on the island of Ikaria. My grandparents
had four children: the oldest lived on the other side of the island in a house
her husband built, the second oldest-my dad-moved to the United States, the
third oldest lived in Athens where he worked as a professor, and the youngest
lived in the house my grandparents built.
My uncle, the third oldest, built this small house
on the island so he would have a place to stay when he visited from Athens. At
the time his children were teenagers, so one bedroom had bunkbeds for them. The
bedrooms were only large enough to hold beds, but in the small houses there was
a bathroom, a shower, a small basic kitchen, and a living-dining room combo. It
also overlooked the ocean, which was just minutes away on foot down a rocky
hill.
Although the house was built to be a family
get-a-way, when I arrived in September of 2016, it had no been used in sixteen
years. The first few days were spent cleaning the interior, trimming the wild
thorny bushes that had consumed the outside, and draining and re-filling the
water tank. It was backbreaking work, but once it was done the house was
finally livable.
We spent several weeks here on our vacation. There
were some odd quirks, no doors on the bedrooms or bathrooms, sand mysteriously
creeping in no matter how much we swept, a few bug critters every now and then,
but there was so much to love.
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