The Kou'mara bush, or "Greek Strawberry Tree"
Rhodes is really two islands. Granted, nowhere will you find the charm of Symi harbour, but the South of the island is brimming with untouched hillsides of olive groves, pine forests, fig trees and sleepy old white villages where you will still see grandmas sitting on shady steps in their headscarves preparing their "Horta" while a dozing cat hangs half-off of a nearby windowsill; roads where for the most part the only other occupants you'll come across are goats or even, if it's dusk, a family of deer.
Rhodes town isn't exactly the essential Greece, but it actually can give one a "fix" of bustle during a long winter when the island is largely devoid of the tourist hordes. Once every month or maybe a little less often, my wife and I will go to town to do a monthly shop (there is something to be said for having a Lidl or two on your island when you consider the cost of food in Greece these days!) and we'll then trot down to Mandraki Harbour, order a coffee and watch the world going by for a while before walking back to our car for the hour-long ride home to our haven of quiet in Kiotari.
Yes we do count our blessings. Our little valley is very green, even in the blistering heat of a Rhodean summer, and the only sounds we wake up to are goats, birds of prey, smaller birds and the breeze through the Kou'mara bushes. We sit outside or at our French windows and gaze down to the blue sea a kilometer or so below us. Living here for some four years and more now, we have become accustomed to the natural rhythm of the seasons. We understand the phases of the moon in ways we never could have done in the UK for two reasons: 1.) The sky was never clear often enough and 2.) The light pollution, even in the small village where we lived for the last five years of our UK lives, didn't permit us to see the sky with sufficient clarity.
Attuning your mode of living to the natural cycles here is very rewarding. For example, we derive immense pleasure from eating fruit and vegetables in their respective seasons. This is good on many levels. Firstly, you feel good about yourself when you buy local produce (not to mention of course, growing your own!) which hasn't been flown or shipped thousands of miles around the planet before eventually landing on your table. You also experience the delight of that first orange of the winter, that first peach of the late summer or fig in August. We know it's now November because, not only can we once again take the fruit out of the fridge and keep it on the coffee table, but we begin to see the fruit bowl groaning under the weight of the first oranges of the season. Cut one in half and squeeze out its juice for breakfast in the morning - you'll never have tasted better fresh orange juice than that which comes out of an orange which only left the tree a matter of hours before. How appropriate too, that the citrus fruit, replete with all its Vitamin C content, becomes available just as the weather is cooling and you need a boost to your system to fight off the first cold that does the rounds!
Can't say either Yvonne-Maria or I are great fans of eating pomegranates. But shove their seed-packed flesh into your juicer and drink the exotically pink-hued juice, strained of course! Now there's one of life's treats and no mistake. You may notice in the above photo a banana or two. Here I throw my hands up and admit, it's the only concession we do make to international fruit travel! Although we still try and buy bananas which are produced as near to home as we can. But they're so flipping useful (especially when sliced on your muesli!) that we have to admit - we buy them year round.
Yet another way you know when it's November is when you get out into the rural areas, like the area around our home, and see the Arbutus Andrachne bushes, better known to the locals as the Kou'mara bush, or to foreigners as the "Greek Strawberry Tree," beginning to flaunt their ripening fruit. I don't quite get this epithet "Strawberry Tree" to be honest. From a distance I suppose the fruit, when ripe, is very red, a similar red to the strawberry perhaps. But closer inspection reveals that the Kou'mara are quite spherical and hang from the plant in much the same way as cherries do from a cherry tree. That's where the similarity to cherries ends though. The Kou'mara have their pits on the outside of the skin, as do strawberries, but the kou'mara pits are the same red colour as the skin, whereas the strawberry's pits are usually brown. When we go picking them, Yvonne-Maria usually eats a few in the process. The pits are quite gritty in the mouth and can get annoyingly stuck between your teeth if you don't look out. Bite into one and you'll immediately see that they bear no resemblance to strawberries with regard to their insides either, which are quite "pasty" in texture and entirely yellowy-orange in colour; quite a contrast to the red colour of the surface. Their sweet taste is not everyone's cup of tea, but I will eat them in small quantities, my wife in somewhat larger ones!
This year I rather fancy that the first ripe Kou'mara are early. We usually expect them to be in abundance during December and into January. They first go orange before turning red and still the majority of them have yet to turn. See the picture at the top of this post, taken a couple of days ago, just up the lane near the house. But the first rainstorm came two weeks early this year, on September 11th in fact, so maybe that accounts for the fruit fleshing up and ripening a week or two early as well.
Well the first locals have already begun their olive harvest too. Soon the roads will be sporting all kinds of pick-ups, weighed down with their sacks or crates of the precious slippery cargo, as they wend their way to the olive mills, once more open for business in the run-up to Christmas. Some even carry their olive gathering into the new year. It just depends on how much help they may have, coupled with how many trees they need to work.
Yes the winter is upon us. The first week of November marks its beginning. There's little or no acknowledgement here of a spring or autumn. The last tourists are flown out of the island on the last weekend in October and on the first Monday of November the roads instantly become a pleasure to drive along once more. In fact, on the TV on Monday November 2nd, a couple of weeks ago, I heard the weather man greeting us with a "Kalo Himo'na," - literally translated - "Good winter!" Then, come the start of the tourist season next year, suddenly everyone will be saying "kalo Kalokairi" - "Good Summer!"
Yvonne and I love the winter. We've already begun our regular 5 or 6 mile walks. What little girth has been added to my waist during the summer months now begins again to fall away as we get on with the serious business of gardening again. I've already put in beetroot, onions (red, yellow and white), Rocket, Lettuce, Parsley and Dill. Got some new tomato plants from Ileas, our friend just south of Gennadi too. The sun was out today and it was 24 degrees C on the terrace as we enjoyed a glass of chilled white wine with our neighbours from up the hill (named Mac and Jane in "Moussaka to My Ears" - the chapter about their dog, Lady).
It'll soon be time to get writing with avengance. Got to get on with the third instalment of "Ramblings from Rhodes," but it'll just wait a few more weeks until the evenings get dark at around five and we get the log fire going. A perfect environment to write in!
