More blossoms, and the smell is thickening - it's exactly, for me, the magic smell of summer in little Greek island villages, when you're coming down a steep street at night between whitewashed houses, and there are branches of jasmine reaching out over walls. I realize, of course, that it's almost exactly twenty years since I was last in Greece - can that be true? - and it mightn't be like that at all, now. The last time I remember being there I'd gone to spend a week thinking - should I move to the US, or not? There wasn't, it turned out, much deliberation involved: I got off the boat, rented a room overlooking the bay on Skopelos, thought - "well, of course I'm going to Rutgers," - went and sat under a pine tree and read Walden, and spent the rest of the week traveling around the island on a bus, and drawing. Actually I did go to Chios since, now I remember - maybe the following year - but it's been a long time, and the smell of jasmine pulls me right back.
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