xristos anesti

After seven hours of cleaning my room yesterday and beginning to box my things that have been 'me' in essence, I am finally in a room where I walk to my bed on bare carpet, no climbing, no shifting objects with my feet. What I find amazing about a clean room, is that it seems that air and sound and smell, all of the untouchable senses are able to really penetrate through to every corner of the space you're in. Particularly sound. I'm listening to Once We All Agree by James Blake right now, and the reverb in this track rings so well of the walls, because there are no obstructions of dirty clothes. It's strange, but it's a small piece of bliss I like to enjoy and will miss this when I don't have my own room and a really good sound set up. So I think that's probably the first thing I'll make sure is ready in my house / apartment when I move out of home, a relatively empty space where sound goes, where I can make sounds, and not have their waves be obstructed, probably with wooden floors, but also an area rug for me to sit and not get a cold butt. I'm very excited.

Today was Easter Sunday, and my youngest sister, Elaina, gave a talk in sacrament meeting about what we can learn about service and selflessness from the Saviour; she cried, it was really touching. Straight after that meeting, my family made the forty five minute drive to Revesby to enjoy Greek Easter which fell on the same weekend as the regular Easter this year. Things have changed since I first remember celebrating Greek Easter. My grandparents haven't done a lamb on the spit for several years now; my uncle is no longer here to sit down at the seat next to my dad--I sat in his space today, it was strange and I felt rude--and go out for a cigarette every so often; yia yia didn't make her red eggs to play the easter egg-cracking game for the first Easter as she is not doing very well health wise at the moment. But I think that in her illness, my papou is the liveliest I have ever seen him to compensate for her lack thereof. And I can see in her dark and deep set eyes that she appreciates it. Yia yia had to leave the table after one bite of lunch because her stomach was upset, and it was a very big wake up call for me, I know very little about my grandparents from Greece, but little by little, Papou slips out small stories either from something that happened in the wartime when he served with the Greek army as a top line engineer in Japan, or something that happened last week. Today he told us two different ones:

-- About five or six years ago, he was keeping about 8 budgies as pets, in a cage near his back fence, and one day he started to notice that there were mice that ate the bird food with the budgies. I assumed it was a peaceful affair, but for some undisclosed reason, my papou decided that wasn't okay. He opened the bird cage, let all of the budgies go, and then went on a mice killing rampage by ripping up a piece of cement in the ground and crushing them (?!?!?). He said he killed about 14 mice. He is the sweetest, most loving man I know, he doesn't let us say thank you for lunch when we leave because he says 'just take anything you want, what's mine is yours' in a very thick Greek accent. So I don't know why he killed them all...but they're in a better place now I guess.

-- This morning, he was out tending to his garden, papou has an apple tree, a mandarin tree and a chestnut tree. A small brown bird 'a very little thing, it was only a little thing' was hopping around on the branches, and somehow ended up in his hands. He said, 'it hopped into my hands, so I carried it just in my hand back into the house, into the bedroom to show Yia yia who was in bed, and it made her happy. I then carried it outside, and it hopped back onto the branch'. They are really beautiful.

I bought myself a new wallet online today, it's olive green, and I knew when I got that colour I was thinking of my heritage, and how lucky I am to have such interesting and colourful lines of ancestry that make me exactly who I am, and these are things I can carry with me wherever I go, especially on my mission for 18 months.

*I'll edit the gross settings later, sorry they're so bland right now, it's coming...*