Book #33: A House in Corfu

We carried this in our bookstore, and the last copy came home with me when we closed up shop (along with, oh, a few other books).

I planned to read it one day when (A) I wanted to hang onto summer a bit longer or (B) I needed to brighten up a bleak winter. Because Greek island.

This week I've been in that liminal space between my annual escape to a family cottage on a lake in Wisconsin and a new semester starting at the university where I teach. So I went with A.

As I read about the family in the book going to great lengths to build a home on crumbling hillside terraces overlooking the sea, I thought of my great grandmother and her vision for our once swampy stretch of shore on the lake.

I think she'd be pleased that nearly 100 years later, so many family members still make pilgrimages there, to connect with the landscape and, more importantly, with one another. I know I've driven thousands of miles every summer to recharge my body and spirit and to pass the legacy on to my son.

The shore of a lake in Wisconsin is a very different place than the coast of the Ionian Sea, but is it really so much when it's about a family and a house?