My Ikaria Read online

  Even though I don’t recall ever cooking chickpeas myself, I know exactly what to do. I grab my biggest pot, half fill it with cold water and pour the chickpeas in. I pick off any that float to the top, as well as any discoloured or misshapen ones. I know that you can add baking soda to the water to help them soften more quickly, but a quick glance at Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion suggests this isn’t necessary, so I just leave them covered overnight.

  The next morning, Sunday, I change the water and put the chickpeas on a slow boil while I potter around. They fill the room with an earthy, wholesome smell that takes me back to Mum’s kitchen. I skim the froth from the top once they come to the boil. Approximately two hours later, I turn off the heat while they are still firm but not chalky in the middle. I let them sit a little longer and they plump up nicely, and then I drain them into a large colander. Half a kilo of dried chickpeas, a few dollars’ worth, has produced more than a kilo and a half of cooked chickpeas. I could have bought them in a can, but this is much more fun, and more economical. When they’ve cooled, I put most of them into containers and freeze them to add to stews and throw into salads. The Ikarians would be proud. So would my mother. I need to ring her instead of letting the thought flit in and out of my mind.

  Inspired by my memories of tomato soup, I then sauté some onions and garlic in olive oil, adding chopped carrots and celery. I cook the vegetables until they’ve softened, adding a few pinches of cumin, nutmeg, chilli and cinnamon. After pouring a few cups of the passata we made last summer over the top, I add the chickpeas and a glass of water. I leave it to simmer for half an hour, making the house smell like a Middle Eastern restaurant. Then I season with salt and pepper and they are done.

  Soon after, the family sits down to the chickpea stew, served with a side of rice. I haven’t put anything else on the kid’s plates – too many options and I know they won’t touch the chickpeas. While our meals are generally accompanied by bread, it is absent today.

  ‘What’s this?’ Emmanuel says.

  ‘Chickpea stew.’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘You haven’t tried it yet.’

  ‘I know I won’t like it,’ he insists.

  ‘That’s all we have today.’

  He takes a small tentative bite, then another. His face tells me they are okay. Bearable. He keeps going. I don’t say anything.

  Dolores also takes a bite. Looks surprised. ‘They’re nice, Mum. The spice is nice.’

  It’s a small coup. Beans have finally made a debut at our family table.

  A few days after eating the chickpea stew, Dolores and I are standing in front of the yoghurt display case at our local supermarket, which spans several metres of the back wall. When did yoghurt start reproducing? I wonder. This is a whole yoghurt-like family, with cousins and great-aunts and even random guests dropping in. There’s yoghurt with fruit, yoghurt with muesli, yoghurt with choc chips. Yoghurt harking from countries around the world, yoghurt with milk that has been stripped of fat, yoghurt with exotic cultures that have been fortified with sugars and vitamins. Further along are the yoghurt-wannabes, strange concoctions in fantastically coloured tubes and chocolate-covered tubs, all promising a quick fix to parental lunchbox dilemmas.

  I visualise my yiayia standing here, overwhelmed by choice. In her day, she made yoghurt from a single ingredient – the organic milk of her own goats, which roamed the fields behind her home. Later, when she was living with my aunt in the bigger town of Kyparissia in southern Greece, they would have had only a couple of options for yoghurt at the local shop. I remember visiting my aunty when a big national chain supermarket came to Kyparissia – amid great family celebration because it would mean a job for my cousin – and the options for yoghurt multiplied again. Enter yoghurts topped with chocolate chips, muesli and garishly coloured lollies. That’s progress for you.

  ‘Can I get this one? I had it at Zoe’s. It was nice.’ The tub Dolores has in her hand is organic vanilla bean yoghurt, expensively priced. She looks at me hopefully, as if to say, ‘this doesn’t look like junk’. She knows I mostly buy the Greek yoghurt my mother bought when I was a kid, but it’s too sour for her taste. I nod and in the trolley it goes. Eating less processed food isn’t going to happen overnight.

  As we continue walking around the supermarket, I furtively read the ingredients of this new interloper yoghurt. They number twelve, the second of which is sugar. Despite its name, it doesn’t even appear to include real vanilla bean, but a vanilla bean ‘mix’ – including starch, more sugar, and something called vanilla bean macerates. Even though I’m tempted to put it back on the shelf at this stage (What are vanilla bean macerates exactly?), I don’t say anything. I’m trying to buy food that doesn’t include a list of ingredients as long as my arm. Food that hasn’t been prepared in a factory. It sounds so simple, but when faced with the many thousands of products on supermarket shelves screaming to be taken home, I realise it’s going to be a process.

  At home, I scoop a little yoghurt into two bowls and add a handful of nuts and berries to the side.

  ‘It’s nice, Mum – not too sweet,’ says Dolores.

  ‘No, it’s quite creamy,’ I say. For the moment, I’m determined to enjoy sitting with my daughter, eating together and chatting. I feel secure in the knowledge that I’m starting to cook more of the food that my yiayia would recognise, and so eating a little vanilla bean macerates – whatever they are – every now and then isn’t going to kill us.

  Moving

  I’m doing a boxing class at the gym for the first time in months, my fist pumping into the black vinyl. Crack. Crack. Crack. The sound is so satisfying. I’d forgotten that when I’m boxing, my body feels strong. My mind feels strong too, all concentrated energy. I am Rocky Balboa in Rocky. Or Maggie Fitzgerald in Million Dollar Baby. Before she breaks her neck. I think to myself that I must make the time to do this more often.

  ‘I’m not one to advocate violence, but hit that bag as if your life depends on it,’ says Helen, our instructor, with a laugh. I smile through my punches. It’s hard to imagine Helen hitting anyone. She’s just come back from a few months in India on some sort of spiritual retreat. She’s also walked the Camino. When I first saw her heading up an indoor cycling class some five years ago, she was all Greek Goddess, her body lithe and well proportioned, her features classical. I peek at her from behind the bag. Time is leaving its mark on her too – her face is less chiselled, her skin sits more loosely, her body has softened and rounded a little. She seems gentler somehow, less driven.

  I look around the room, losing focus for a moment. There are several familiar faces here, people who have been coming for years. There are the serial exercisers, who supplement one or two classes a day with running and gym work and leisurely trips out to the Dandenong Hills to climb a thousand steps on a Sunday morning. There are those, like me, who try and come in a few times a week when we’re not too busy, trying to keep on top of the incremental weight gain, needing institutionalised help to meet our quota of rigorous exercise. Many of us are ‘Mums with jobs’: there’s the GP who’s trying to shed the weight she gained during pregnancy so she can be a good role model to her patients; the overworked politician who spends too many nights eating out; the new mother who is worried about becoming obese like most of the rest of her family. We try to make a little space in our week to look after our bodies. And our heads. If I let exercise lapse, as I’ve done recently, I become irritable, mildly anxious. It’s not an option to give up fitness classes. Then there are the newbies, who enthusiastically buy a gym membership shortly after the New Year, come to a few classes, and are never to be seen again.

  I wonder what my yiayia would make of this institution full of sweaty people paying good money to punch boxing bags, cycle on stationary bikes, breathe and stretch while lying on fluorescent mats. What she would make of the things we need to buy to keep fit – lycra workout gear that sticks unflatteringly to the bumps on our bodies, the accou
trements for each new fad class, expensive gym memberships and all manner of gadgets to keep our bodies moving. These things didn’t even exist in her vocabulary. Did the word ‘fit’ even exist?

  Yiayia walked, collected wood for her fire, fed her animals each day and did the back-breaking work of harvesting olives each year. The idea of her worrying about her heart rate, burning calories or getting a ‘good workout’ makes me laugh out loud. I think of the elderly Ikarians, who in the past had no choice but to get around their hilly land on foot or, if they were lucky, on donkeys.

  But there are no donkeys here. The gymnasium next door, which I can see through the glass, has sleek exercise machines, all lined up. There are several televisions on, and the people walking or running on the treadmills have ear buds in. They stare straight ahead. Several people on the bikes have their phones out. I haven’t been in that part of the gym for many months and I suddenly realise why. It bores me. I make a mental note to walk downstairs after class and ditch that part of my gym membership. I can feel Yiayia guiding me. Bravo, Spiridoula. Save your money.

  ‘We should go. It will get too dark if we don’t go on a walk soon,’ I say to Dolores a few days later. Spring is morphing into summer, but the long evenings of twilight are still a little way off.

  She sighs and goes to her room to put her runners on. Her body language says she’d much prefer to lie on her bed and watch one of the many TV series she is following. But once we’re on the way, she walks faster than me, ponytail swinging. I try to keep up.

  A few weeks ago, I suggested to Dolores that we start walking together of an evening. The Ikarians have made me think about how we can move more – and how to connect more through our daily rituals. A walk together ticks both boxes. After initial resistance from Dolores (‘Mum, aren’t you taking this Ikarian thing a bit far?!’), I can see that she now enjoys it.

  We make our way up the street, heading towards her old primary school, where we do several laps of the bush track, crunching the gravel to a symphony of rainbow lorikeets and kookaburras. The rhythmic sound of our feet, the movement of our bodies and our snippets of conversation serve to relax us. After we’ve covered the important topics – what pressing assignments Dolores has due, whether she can go out with friends on the weekend, what I’m working on at the moment – we walk in companionable silence.

  I keep waiting for Dolores to hit the difficult teenage years, but she is sensible, mature, contained. Every now and then I tease her, tell her she can deviate from the straight and narrow.

  ‘Why would I want to do silly things, just for the sake of it?’ she asks.

  Why indeed? Despite my teasing, I’m grateful she has a stable group of friends, that she enjoys school, that she still doesn’t mind hanging out with me every now and then.

  As we walk, I remember a dream many years ago, in the early days of courtship with George. In it, a little girl, a toddler, stood beside me. I felt an overwhelming sense of love for her, a strong bond I would be hard pressed to describe in words. I woke feeling wistful, knowing that the child in my dream was my daughter.

  ‘Should we do another lap?’ Dolores says.

  ‘Maybe just one more,’ I reply.

  When we get home, Dolores flops onto her bed. ‘Thanks Mum. That was nice.’

  I go out to check on Emmanuel in my studio office. He hasn’t moved from the computer since we left, making random internet searches. He’s got a YouTube video of the Bees Gees clip ‘Staying Alive’ playing in the background.

  ‘Where did you find that?’ I ask.

  ‘I searched 1970s disco hits.’

  I laugh as the impossibly white teeth and pants of Barry Gibb flash by, and soon Emmanuel and I are dancing, gyrating around the study, trying to reproduce Travolta’s athletic moves. It’s near impossible on carpet and Emmanuel manages better than I, although he is impressed with my face waves and disco points.

  ‘Where did you learn to do that, Mum?’

  ‘In front of the mirror. This is the music I grew up to.’ I check the date on the clip. ‘I was seven years old when this came out,’ I huff through knee knocks.

  By the time the clip finishes, we’ve worked up a decent sweat and the step counter the family got me for Christmas has buzzed. Even though I haven’t done any formal exercise today, I’ve reached my 10,000 steps. We walk back to the house through the garden, and Emmanuel wants to lie on the grass like he did as a kid. He invites me to join him. The first stars have just come out.

  ‘If you could solve the problem of world hunger, but I had to die, would you choose to save me, or get rid of hunger?’ he asks as we’re lying there.

  ‘Emmanuel, you know I can’t answer that.’

  ‘You should choose to end world hunger.’

  ‘I know that in my head. But in my heart, I would want to save you.’

  Emmanuel asks more thorny questions that I can’t solve, until I finally drag myself up. ‘These dilemmas are going to have to wait for the morning. I can’t keep up.’

  Later, I join George in bed. Thinking of a young Travolta in shiny spandex shirt, impossibly tight pants, chunky platform heels, I let out a guffaw.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ George asks.

  ‘I wonder how John Travolta would go dancing to “Staying Alive” now,’ I reply, thinking of the recent photos I’ve seen of him, and how he looks considerably stouter than he did in his heyday. Then again, so do I.

  George rolls his eyes. He simply can’t understand the thing I have for disco music and cheesy dance movies.

  He goes back to his book and I switch off my bedside light, happily tired, ‘Staying Alive’ playing on repeat in my head.

  Lazing

  It’s now the summer holidays and I’m enjoying having more time with the kids, visiting family more often, reading more books. Mum is pleased – we have visited her a few times in the past few weeks. She has picked cucumbers and tomatoes from her garden, cooked massive amounts of home-cut chips for the kids. While the kids recover from the excesses on the coach, I rejoice in the time I have with Mum to catch up on news and gossip a little.

  Time seems to slow now that we don’t have to get up early for school runs. The Ikarians are never far from my mind, and I reflect that they seem to intuitively follow the rhythms of the day, rather than forcing time to submit to their whims. While the dream of going to Ikaria is still in the back of my mind, I’m more aware that there is a lot to enjoy right here in our own home – the washing blowing in the early morning sun, the hammock swinging under the olive tree, our cat stretching out over the curve of the wood-fired oven.

  With a bit more time on our hands, I wake early to work. Then George and I potter around our home, doing projects that have lapsed during the year – clearing the garage, washing windows, decluttering cupboards.

  When George returns to work, meal times become lax, the meals even more improvised that usual. Today, we’re having a tub of leftover ragout mixed in with some ripe tomatoes to make it go further, and spooned over pasta. I call the kids and we take lunch out to a small garden table in the shade. Dolores brings water and glasses. Emmanuel pulls in a third seat from the garden. When Dolores gets up to get some more glasses, Emmanuel claims her more comfortable seat. They bicker. Automatically, I consider trying to bring the argument to a close, but it blows over quickly and soon we are eating the pasta ragout.

  ‘It’s good Mum,’ says Emmanuel. For him, having only woken an hour before, this is breakfast. ‘Is there any more?’

  There is, and he gets himself another bowl. The ragout is better than it was a few days ago when George made it: the flavours have settled; the sauce is thicker. I see Dolores eyeing Emmanuel’s plate enviously. She too wants seconds, but is resisting the urge.

  After we eat, Emmanuel lies face down on the deck, in the same way he did as a young child, only now he is much longer, his body more angular.

  ‘You look like a lizard in the sun,’ I say.

  He smiles, stretching his legs an
d putting his cheek to the warm boards that line this part of the garden.

  ‘Can I pour water over you?’ asks Dolores, holding the dregs of her glass up to her brother, grinning.

  ‘Okay.’

  As she pours the water down his back, Emmanuel wriggles and laughs at the shock of the cold liquid on his warm back. It seeps into the fabric of his pyjama top.

  There are peach pits strewn at my feet. The possums have had their fill of the fruit before us. Getting up, I find three peaches from our tree that are almost ripe. I wash them and give one to each of my kids. Mine has some insects and a tiny worm in it, and I carefully cut around these and throw them into the garden, just as my mother did when I was a child. The kids look on, intrigued. I’m not letting the peach go to waste. While it’s a little too firm, and not quite sweet enough, the flavour trumps anything I have bought from the shops recently.

  Emmanuel gives Dolores permission to pour another glass of water over him. She then takes the jug and holds it up expectantly. Emmanuel nods. I am surprised at the burgeoning relationship that is subtly unfolding between our children – nuanced looks that signal agreement, spontaneous hugs, laughter at shared jokes – which was unimaginable a few years ago.

  Emmanuel squirms and giggles as Dolores pours the water on his back, down his legs, into the neck of his t-shirt. Soon he is lying in a small puddle of water. I watch as the sun dries its edges out. We talk, comfortably full and in no rush to move.

  The dishes are piled up beside us. I am aware that there are chores that await inside, as always – the washing that needs to be brought in, the emails that need to be sent, the floor that could do with a vacuum. And as I do them, the kids will probably wind their way back to their devices, talking to their friends or playing games. This is a small moment of grace in our day. I’m determined to savour it for as long as possible.