Sunshine on my island comes with a money-back guarantee. It’s a package-holiday wager, and a good one. It is tradition for sale, Soultanina vineyards, grapes crushed the old way, goats herded on mountain sides, miled the old way, parks of acacia, eucalyptis, stands of pine, cypress trees, huddles of fig, rows of lowland rose-bay, Larnaca palms ringed in deliberate rock, garden roses, hibiscus, pomegranate. And especially olive groves, press after renovated press, olives crusthed the old way, the better way, slate roofs on crumbling houses, rotting wood doorframes, grey houses of stone and especially the bright white and cobalt trinkets in the shape of palm trees, flip flops, sailboats, churches, and gulls. Shopkeepers drag racks of these things (refrigerator magnets, salt shakers, paperweights) into the sun along with misspelled sandwich boards announcing lunches whose making can be watched. In Thasos and in Cyprus, a tourist can see the traditional fire-lance wet under a cement-and-local-stone fountain and used to stoke coals for lunch, traditional women hunched over needlework pillows on chairs a foot high, shoemakers cranking leather, fishermen setting their nets, and young men tearing pinna nobilis from its crevice fifty feet under turning byssus to shreds—even our houses are on display, and their insides, the tiny coffee cups and gas burners and the way women tell fortunes by spilling the grinds. If I could read coffee cups, I’d see white and blue churches for sale, and colors of the Cyclads donned like a chef’s white costume, a nurse’s scrubs, the blue foam skin of a diver reaching into the deep.
Author Bio:
Joanna Eleftheriou grew up in New York and Cyprus, and studied at Cornell, the Center for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham, and Old Dominion before beginning doctoral work in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Missouri. She has worked as a teacher of ESL, literature and creative writing, and her essays, poems, and translations have appeared in journals including The Crab Orchard Review, Chautauqua, and The Common.
Author Bio:
Joanna Eleftheriou grew up in New York and Cyprus, and studied at Cornell, the Center for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham, and Old Dominion before beginning doctoral work in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Missouri. She has worked as a teacher of ESL, literature and creative writing, and her essays, poems, and translations have appeared in journals including The Crab Orchard Review, Chautauqua, and The Common.
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