Last week, the lovely Academic, Hopeful tagged me in a meme-type post about folders and photos.  An easy diversion, a good way to kick-start the blog again.  Pick the 10th photo of your first folder of photos and post it.  So here’s Greece, the summer I graduated from high school.  My toes in the lower right-hand corner; a Vodaphone ferry taking off from the port at Parikia on Paros.  I was sunbathing after a breakfast of yogurt, honey, and fresh fruit. I was reading either The Green Hills of Africa or Lady Chatterly’s Lover. I was recovering from a nasty cold, wearing a new candy-striped bikini I’d bought in town the day before.  Look at that sky.  That sea. It was the mildest water I’ve ever felt.  It’s easy to fall into this photograph now, in the grey and gloom of an Oxford November.  I wouldn’t want to be seventeen again, abroad on my own for the first time.  Everything felt so intense–the colours, the tastes, everything I did, smelled, felt.  The sunburn and the cool relief of an evening wind.  I was over-saturated in experience.  Still, it was beautiful, and still, on a night like this, only half-past-four and the darkness settling in,  I think I could use a little nap in the sunshine.

Since we’re talking of sunshine, I’m tagging my mom, who writes this beautiful blog from her warm home in California…