long life

This granny was born in 1913. We share the same name.

She lost her mother in the influenza pandemic of 1918. She spent her childhood in the village hiding from pirates and threshing wheat. Sometimes, she danced all night at the Church of Agios Panteleimon.

At the age of 19, in a very discreet and indirect way, she found herself engaged to be married. The village was exercising some subtle pressure on her husband-to-be to choose a wife, get settled. He declared staunchly that he wasn’t interested in marriage; he wanted to “create himself” first. But there was one girl, he admitted, who had caught his eye.

She comes from a good family, the intermediaries enthusiastically responded, but they don’t last long. There’s always something. She has outlived them all, of course.

When she was approached, her first reaction was also to declare an adamant disinterest in marriage. “You’d better think hard,” they told her. “He’s a good man.” So she turned it over more than once in her mind -- and realized that since those people were neither his relatives nor hers, they had nothing to gain from the match. When the couple finally came face to face, he wanted to be sure that it was her decision to marry him, not the village’s. “I take you,” she said, and she did.

There are no pictures from their wedding, no pictures at all from their youth. But there is one of them in old age, taken by a tourist on her way to the village museum. It shows an old man and an old woman sitting outside the house they rebuilt with their own hands after the Germans burnt it and everything in it and around it to the ground. Hand in hand. And proud.