Water, Fruit and Gripes

Water is the main source of life here. As almost everyone in the village is either a professional farmer or a serious hobby enthusiast, all cultivate fruit trees, vegetable gardens or some variation of both. In fact, even we have lemon and fig trees in our garden.

According to Dad, there exist water rights in the village. A hundred years ago or so, these water rights were divied up between the existing families and set times were given as to who can use the water when. As these were antiquated times, the dowry went to the sons. Nothing was given to the daughter. So my great grandmother, Katerina, whose family had water rights, was given none on her marriage. Of course, times change and in the next generation, dowries were given to the girls but that's neither here nor there as we are in present day and dowries are given to none. But let's stay in the present, where we as a family, have no water rights. We cannot even put a hose on the vrisi (faucet) on the road and draw water to water the very thirsty lemon trees. Our bougainvillea on the other hand seems to do just fine without any water at all. We won't even mention the poor grapevines in our field as some goats had 'wandered' into our yard before we had gotten here in June and ate all the leaves and grapes off the vine. So we will talk about gripes.

Carmela and the various Stamna family members will on odd times wander from the kato horio (down village) to the pera horio (the over there village) just to see if Pippino has put a hose in the vrisi to water his garden in the field beneath his house. If they see the hose, they'll turn off the faucet and pull the hose out. The Gabelli's do that too. Although oddly enough, even though they have a water time, they still come to that same vrisi to water their plants or wash their swimsuits or clean their pavement with.

Dad gripes about the water because he has no water rights. Annezoula gripes about the water because whenever it's her turn, she never seems to have any. Carmela gripes about the water because, well, let's face it, that family is greedy and if they could swing it, would take all the water. In fact, they have an illegal well on their property that runs pretty deep. I'm not sure why nobody rats them out. Ntonado doesn't gripe about the water because he buys stremmata (lots) that have water on them and then runs hoses down the mountain. If one bothers to look there are dozens of hoses following the road that come down the mountain. Whoever has water just brings it down to his garden.

And then there's the non-gripers and they share the bounty of their labors. Mantho left us melon. Ntonado's dad brought us tomatoes and eggs (and even two turkey eggs). Ponti gave us potatoes. Georgia Mixeli brought zucchini. Eirine gave us apricots. Fragkoula just brought some very fresh cut, moments off the vine, cucumbers, which Baby enjoyed munching on. The Darmis gave us tomatoes. Ioanna Gre gave us baby eggplant that was absolutely succulent. In fact, they share the fruit of their sweat with all the villagers, farmers and non farmers alike.