I first heard the term “shoulder season” last May, in France. We had driven up winding roads, through pine forests to reach an auberge I had long dreamt of for its breakfasts. We were there in the first weeks of the season. The kitchen was finding its rhythm as we easily slowed ours to the rate of mealtimes, the weekend morning market, walks down mossy paths in between rain showers.
In late October, we made our way to Athens and found ourselves on the other shoulder and in a slice of “little summer” as our taxi driver informed us. We had arrived on the feast day of St. Demetrios, which brought with it a last heated hurrah.
He dropped us outside Athens at the Vorres Museum, a collection of Greek Contemporary & Folk art and we entered a courtyard lined with sculptures, against brilliant white-washed walls under a deep blue sky.
In the earlier morning light, we’d marvelled at the marble, like millions before us, that remained standing atop the Acropolis. There stood goddesses posturing as columns, upon their heads rested centuries of weight. I wanted to ask them if the stone got heavier with each trace of something removed?
The Vorres museum was originally the home of Greek Collector Ian Vorres, it reminded me of the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul de Vence and Kettles Yard in Cambridge in its combination of the qualities of both house and museum.
By the front door a loose stone figure stood at the head of the line. A curve and a kink indicated the fall of a skirt, the bend of a knee. Her arms met above her head and between her shoulders and neck, two ovals filled with the negative space beyond the stone. On the wall, a painted blue figure, “My Best Friend on the Balcony” 1971 by Alekos Fassianos adopted a similar pose, arm raised and hanging behind his head. He could be stretching or reclining. He pulls a striped towel into the canvas and other than the balcony’s pattern, the space behind him is painted white. Just white noise, above the blue. On another wall, a green female figure in a painting by Jannis Spyropoulos titled “Summer at the Sea” 1954, also raises an arm behind her head in the company of a friend. They recline on their deck chairs before a port rocking a few boats peacefully.
As we made our way around the house, there were more reclining figures, in stone and paint, from antiquity to modernity. Into the garden, their languid limbs blurred into the sway of the branches. Between the soft foliage of trees, a café hummed with local families and their slow Sunday energy. We sat amongst them and ate our lunch as a woman sat reading in a sliver of sunlight, her dog asleep beneath her chair. A young boy toddled up and down shallow steps, learning the rhythms of placing his feet. A group of young brothers tore slices of pizza and chatted animatedly in Greek as if older men, discussing politics.
At the Acropolis museum the next day, surrounded by a parade of fragmented figures draped in cloth, myth, memory, I thought of all the meaning held in those poses. The beliefs, the stories, the gods. The weight of upholding things beyond your powers. I thought of how the breeze still ripples the folds of their clothes. I thought of how it has all been lost and forgotten, challenged and destroyed, found and remembered. I thought of what remained for my eyes to take in: these postures of man, beast, demon and hope.
Waiting for the ferry in the Athens port, I watched from afar as a group approached the boats pulling heavy loads and raised questioning shoulders to which a uniformed captain responded with a tilt of their wrist. A question of time. As we pulled into the port at Hydra, a military parade was unfolding and under the midday sun, two men shook hands in white and blue. An answer to remembrance.
One morning at breakfast, a woman sat eating in the hotel courtyard. On her table, a basket of bread, honey, yoghurt, some grapes, a cafetière half-emptied and a thick paperback unopened. Around her shoulders a soft beige jumper and at a glance, she was a perfect posture of relaxation.
On our last island afternoon, I lay down on the warm rocks, pressing my shoulders against their unforgiving forms. I raised my arms above my head to block the sunlight with my book. I was reading Girl meets Boy by Ali Smith and I hit the line: “I was used to the changes that came out of the blue. The old blue, that is. The blue that belonged to the old spectrum.” In all my thoughts on the language in our bodies and what gets set in stone, I hadn’t really considered the shifting depths of blue. I turned my head to watched still-brown shoulders dip below the water’s darkening surface.
We stayed to watch the sunset. In the rocky inlet, we puzzled over crossword clues and around us, figures posed cautiously and confidently in front of cameras. The question of what of this will be remembered, repeated, forgotten by next season slipped away with the last of the day’s light.
