It has been a ‘peculiar’ summer to say the least. I was lucky enough to have moved to our Kéa Island home since the 10th March ‘21 until the first days of September i.e.for a full 6 months period, with only two weekly interims for getting the Moderna Vaccination 💉 touching bases with my Neurologist, plus one more for participating to the #Sisoe Classics & Supercars Drive in early June. A most befitting clip would be the immortal performance of Summertime by Janis Joplin:

On the other, dark side of the summertime comes this:

This summer has been a thriller for me, minly due to the deterioration of my Parkinson’s Disease 🦠 situation.

A short 6-month account of our life experiences in Kea of 2021

1. March 2021

We arrived on March 10th via F/B Macedon. But allow me to retract a bit. Five days earlier I was fortunate to be referred by my high school buddy Yanis Zirinis, to a Zimbabwean lady, Ms. Sabina Mutnhima, with the intention of hiring her as my companion, assistant, caregiver, maid and cook to say the least. The interview was successful and all of a sudden Sabina entered my life.
After settling in I started to teach her all about the house details, encouraging her to keep a scrapbook. I often compare the house as a sailing ⛵️ boat with all its complexities BUT without having to worry about dragging anchors 🤩…

On that month I experienced my first nasty fall. As the weather conditions were ‘wintery’ we had the central heating system on. One early morning around 06:30 🕡 I woke up feeling a bit chilly. Apparently the boiler furnace had stopped during the night. Hence I ventured outside using the back door, leading via a steep and narrow stairway to the boiler room. A managed to restart the furnace but on my ascent back, at he end of the hand railing, all of a sudden I lost my balance and summersaulted on the ground on the side of the stairway, sliding down uncontrollably among the various thorns of springtime…

Sabina could not hear me, nor did I have my iPHONE 📱 or my iWatch 🤬. Aside from the fact that I wasn’t seriously hurt, I couldn’t extract myself from he awkward position I was in. After a lot of effort I finally managed to get up. Just realized that one of my slippers had fallen aside into the rich vegetation of Spring. I just left it there and limped back inside the house and eventually dropped exhausted into my bed…

2. April

  April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

The Waste Land, by T.S. Elliot

That April in #Kea was a bit cruel. We had rain 🌧, cool temperatures, and lots of chores to take care of. One of these being the recommissioning of the pool. Due to the #Covid19Lockdown imposed from November 2020 up to February 2021, we could not visit our property since we left last September. At that time I was forced to leave 1/3 of the pool water 💧 with the intention to empty it at a later month into the cistern. Hence the water left untreated for six months, was murky, full of debris and algae…A task which I couldn’t undertake by myself even with Sabina’s assistance.
Enter Batsi [a local Albanian worker I have been using for several years].