50c - At Mum's Village (Aftermath)

After the end of Primary School visits to the village became scarcer. I had a tall mountain of education and exams to climb, under the intense pressure and watchful eyes of my parents, along with the travails of adolescence. Yet, Vassilis, his future in life somehow predetermined, kept asking Domna of any plans I might have to visit the village -for a long while, even after I left to study abroad. Years later, in one of our rare visits to the old house, which, after grandpa’s passing became auntie Domna’s and her husband’s home, uncle Peter through the front window pointed to me the stout figure of Vassilis standing in the courtyard of the old grocery store, in front of its adjacent warehouses. "Do you want to go and talk with him? He always asks about you…" I declined: "Let’s leave it for now, maybe another time... It’s awkward after so many years." Decades had passed, personalities reformed, faces and bodies aged and became frighteningly unrecognizable from the children we once were. I saw little meaning in digging out scattered memories from that distant childhood. Their recollection through a small chat between two persons who, once upon a time, were related as friends and playmates renders melancholy, even depression. Besides, conversations about the past with an introvert would have inevitably ended in platitudes and pointless statements and cliches about the irreversible passage of time: "Wow, how come time flies like this… It was like yesterday that we were playing marbles under the tree that is no more, or singing the carols hoping for money instead of treats, or targeting birds with our catapults or getting filthy in your dad’s warehouses..." My introverted nature could hardly have coped. A message exchange after a few months on Facebook, with a vague promise of meeting up in the first opportunity, was the most convenient way out from a return to a past that cannot be relived.

The apples fall under the tree that bore them, as the saying goes, and the two brothers, Vassilis and Alekos, continued and expanded the grocery business of Petros. Judging by the general lack of camaraderie between the two siblings as they were growing up, having divided the inheritance, they set up and established independent, most likely competing chains of convenience stores in the same and the surrounding villages: “Everything Low Price and High Quality!" was the slogan of one, "Whatever you Need is Next to your Doorstep!" of the other. Petros would have been proud. Auntie Domna and uncle Peter, however, like many others in a changing world, opted for the supermarket franchises for their weekly shopping.

Years were gone by, people left so as not to return. Grandparents’ house in the village was rented by an Albanian neighbour after uncle Peter’s passing. One of Vassilis' convenience stores with large, clearly visible signs from afar, across the street from the wholesale drinks trade of my cousins, still thrives at the crossroads despite the competition from major supermarkets nearby. Petros' old grocery store and its warehouses, with their windows covered with shutters, devoid of goods in their emptiness and darkness, are still there, a reminder of a carefree childhood in the rare times I visited ever since.  Oh, and the mortadella, the ‘Macedonian’ halva, the olives, the other delicacies that Domna bought for me from that store.