Ο Κίτσος Λούης απαριθμεί τα γεγονότα της χρονιάς όπως ο ίδιος και η οικογένειά του τα έζησε, μία συνήθεια που κρατάει τα τελευταία χρόνια.
Dear family, dear friends,
I’m writing this on my brand-new laptop running the latest macOS, meaning that, in contrast to previous years, I have high hopes that I’ll be able to send this circular to you without spending 2-3 days trying to find what’s so wrong with my mailing list. Well, be that as it may, here is the brief history of the “Cretan” Louis family during the last 12 months.
First of all, the good news: healthwise there were only “harmless” problems for both of us, i.e. mostly orthopedic events/cases, sometimes very bothersome of course (shoulders, hips, feet, wrists, etc.), but one or two visits to our new “mechanic” (the son of good friends) and we’re again moving fast. Then, a couple of months ago, briefly before getting our 7th vaccine, we both got Covid: our second bout after two years. Completely harmless though, almost like a common cold, and we were both prescribed the anti-Covid “wonderdrug” (Paxlovid) which, in Greece, is only given to people over 70 and those at risk of saying goodbye for good. Both of us tested negative after four days of taking the medication. My symptoms lasted for only 3-4 days (nose running) while Annoula was coughing for about a week or so and that was it! Anyway, the worst thing about it was that we had planned to get vaccinated in the town of Anogeia high up on our home mountain (Psiloritis), combining this with a long walk with our dogs, followed by a good lamb-based lunch; cancelled, of course (no need for vaccination for the time being), and postponed to next year. Other than the obove, the year was very calm (medically speaking) with the exception of my intentionally losing a lot of weight through a big reduction of calories uptake: down to what I saw on the balance in the early 80s. The nicest thing about it is that I now unearth old pants that fit, actually they’re much wider and… longer, since I shrunk: 76 years old and shorter than both of our “boys”. Finally, a trip to Egypt including its deep South brought back amazing school memories that would make RFK jr. mad: after 60 years or so, we were both vaccinated for polio (!), following the suggestion of our local Health Dept. due to the influx of refugees from neighbouring Sudan and a local epidemic (result of the bloody, ongoing civil war). The cholera vaccination, which was also suggested, was replaced by packing a good supply of doxycycline, which, though, came back to Crete unused by me. In contrast, I prescribed Anoula a week-long, successful treatment with the first signs of Montezuma’s revenge – well, his Egyptian counterpart.
If you wonder if we travel because life in Crete is a boring routine, let me assure you it is not! We had our house and all outside walls including the wood oven painted, we took off the bath tub and replaced it with a shower, we replaced the fancy terrace door with a new fancy one (the old one’s sliding mechanism broke after many years and there were no parts to replace/fix it); right now we’re having several tiles replaced on our terrace. In brief a lot of money and nerves spent; well, our “new” house is already 26 years old… Talking about our “residence”, we’ve had a two year drought on the island (less than 30 cm of rain per year) and the garden obviously suffers. Stll, our olive trees produced about 80 litres of oil and our new grapes (we replaced the old ones with Syrah 4 years ago) were turned into 35 litres of tsikoudia/raki. Unfortunately, the day after we brought it home I hit the container while parking the car and only 5 of the 35 litres stayed in it. The parking space smelled very nicely for several hours but, anyway, no big harm since we have reduced substantially the amount of alcohol we consume. We’re now waiting for next year, hopefully also with lots of red wine too! By the way, the raki was made from 100% Syrah grapes, a first in Crete according to our distiller; it tasted very good! As for the garden that suffers from the lack of rain, it only started getting its usual, greenl winter carpet (Oxalis pescaprae – ξυνήθρα) one month later than in previous years. And fig trees just started losing their leaves…
Talking about travel, we both moved around quite a bit compared to the last few (Covid) years. An. was in Switzerland in March spending a few days with a very good childhood friend and, of course, Alexandros. In May we were in the town of Vonitsa (western Greece) along with the dogs. We avoided the superhighway and drove there through the amazingly beautiful Agrafa Mountains (high mountains, rain forest, lakes, etc.) where we got lost for 3-4 hours (no road signage). We didn’t mind, though, I refused to use my GPS since it was extremely nice spending more time in this fantastic nature. After finding our way out, the next three days we were eating lots and lots of the best mussles we had in our lives (along with other seafood). This was followed by ten days on our beloved island of Paxoi and then back to Crete after a total of three weeks. An. almost immediately left for her annual trip to Germany, which was followed in early September by a 10 days stay in Chicago visiting an old good friend of ours. As already mentioned in the “Health section”, in October we both went to Egypt (see below) and one month ago she was back in Germany for the 80th birthday of her brother Heino. For my part. I took two brief trips to Zurich (September) and Cyprus (a couple of weeks ago) to visit our sons and, of course, Egypt: back to Africa after about 10 years for a total of 10 days, along with my best friends from Med School times (more than 50 years ago) and their wives. We visited temples, tombs, museums, the amazing library of Alexandria (by itself worth a trip), took a cruise on the Nile, and ate good food. In three words, it was great. Even greater was the fact that even after decades, we all got along like back then, when we were young. So the three couples decided to “repeat” the reunion next year in Crete!
The only bad period of the year was in early September during An’s. stay in Chicago, when our dogs went AWOL. I searched them by car knowing that I was not going to find them, I went around distributing a “Wanted poster”, slept for two nights with the terrace lights on, house doors and garden gate open, etc. They came back at three am after 42 hours (!), exhausted but otherwise healthy. Their vet calculated that they must have been walking for between 100 and 200 km (they were spotted by Lindoro’s previous “barber” about 15 km from home). Liu, about 15 years old, slept continously on the couch for 27 hours (only interrupted by two very brief visits of the garden for obvious reasons) while Lindoro (8 years old) recuperated very fast. Anyway, we both hope it was the last time they went AWOL. Even with the Apple Airtags Philippos bought for them, we don’t want to go through this again (too old for that!). Thankfully, Philippos flew over from Cyprus for moral support and to help me with finding them; he arrived in Crete a few hours after their… return.
Talking about him, both sons visited us three times during the year. Both of them still leave abroad, Alexandros working for the sales department of Radisson in Zurich and Philippos is an economist at the University of Cyprus. Both are expected here in a couple of days, so I’ll soon have to start planning what to cook for the welcoming dinner. By the way, you’ll notice that I spent fewer words on the sons than on the dogs, this obviously only means that the former are fine, both in terms of their health and social life!
Finally, I attach three photos. The first one is from the visit of Hatshepsut’s temple in Luxor, the second one shows an example of Annoula’s daily “apres nage” at her favourite beach a few days ago (brrrrrr) and the third one shows my encounter with a feral donkey (my second most favoured animal after dogs) on Cyprus.
That’s it for now, I hope that all of you are and remain healthy and I wish you all Merry X’mas and a very, very happy and healthy New Year!
K. & An.
