That Summer in Maritsa’s Shadow

The old house still smelled of jasmine and soap. Decades had passed since its last occupants had left, yet every corner remained still, frozen in time, as if it were waiting. On the floor, beside the iron-framed bed, stood Maritsa’s chest.

I opened it with hesitation—and love. There, beneath an embroidered kerchief, among yellowed notebooks and a bar of soap that had captured the scent of the past, I found the letter. And just like that, everything came rushing back.

I was only nine years old when my parents left me in the village for a few weeks. “You’ll have a wonderful time with your grandmother,” they said. I wasn’t so sure.

Maritsa was strict. Her headscarf was always tied tightly, and she wore thick socks even in the July heat. She wasn’t like the other grandmothers. She didn’t know how to play children's games, and she had neither a radio nor a television. But she had a garden full of figs, tomatoes, and basil—and a heart that didn’t reveal itself at first glance.

The first thing she introduced me to was the making of *trahanas*, a traditional fermented soup base. “If you don’t touch the wheat with your hands, you won’t learn anything,” she told me. I watched her stir the sour mixture and spread the little bites out on white sheets under the sun. She let me taste some: sour, unusual, but I felt proud to help.

One day, rain caught us on the way back from the threshing floor. Instead of scolding, she took off her headscarf and covered my head. She smiled. “You must stay dry. Life brings other storms.”

That was the first time I truly felt close to her.

By late August, the courtyard filled with crates. The tomatoes, deep red, waited their turn. She sliced them reverently and placed them in a large pot. The whole process felt like a sacred ritual: silence, care, and the occasional hymn murmured softly. Then she laid them on cloths to dry in the sun. The aroma of the paste mingled with the scent of basil, and the whole yard smelled like summer.

Once, I asked her why she did everything with her hands. She smiled. “So I can leave a trace. Whatever you touch with your soul, stays.”

At night, I slept beside her chest, too afraid to be alone in the wooden house. She rose every dawn, lighting a small oil lamp, brewing coffee from roasted chickpeas. It seemed as if she never slept—only prayed, cooked, and waited for something unspoken. She’d make the sign of the cross and whisper words I didn’t understand then, but now echo in my memory: “We must endure for those who could not.”

One day she took me further than usual. We passed three neighborhoods, some stone wells, and Petros’s café, until we reached her olive grove. “Here, my girl, are roots that cannot be uprooted. I planted them with Giannis’s money.”

Giannis, her husband, had worked in the mines in Africa. When he died in an accident, they sent her compensation. She didn’t keep it for herself. She bought the land. “So I wouldn’t feel empty. Every olive tree, a prayer. Every olive, a hope.”

We sat beneath a tree and she told me about Giannis. How he wrote her letters, always ending the same way: “Kisses from the sun of the South.” In his final one, he had written: “If anything happens to me, keep living. And plant roots where we once dreamed.”

I remember her gently stroking the trunk of an olive tree. “Even if it doesn’t bear fruit this year, its time will come.”

A few days before I left, she asked me to help clean her chest. Inside were blankets, old photographs, two dresses, and a bar of jasmine soap. She handed me a notebook. “If you like, write in here what you learn.”

I had never opened it until today. And yet, on the cover, in her handwriting, she had written:

“To my little one, when she becomes a woman. So she’ll remember that summers are not just sunshine. They are the things we learn when everything is light.”

As I turned my gaze to the old windowsill, more moments came to mind. Summer afternoons beneath the grapevine, where she taught me to knit. I had no patience—my hands tangled in the yarn—but she never scolded me. “Slowly, like all things worth doing,” she’d say.

I remember the Sundays when she dressed in her black skirt and we walked to church together. She walked slowly, chin held high, greeting everyone with grace. People respected her—not out of fear, but because she meant every word she said. And whatever she promised, she kept. When I once asked her why she prayed every day, she simply said, “To keep the world in place.”

I sat at the windowsill of the old house. The courtyard was quiet. My grandmother was no longer there—but she was everywhere. In the air, in the oregano still growing along the path, in the jasmine-scented soap, in the sound of the wind bending the branches of the olive tree.

That summer—I didn’t just live it. I learned it. I carry it within me like a gentle flame, like a footprint in soil that never fades. Maritsa never really left. Because what is deeply rooted does not disappear. It simply waits to be remembered.

Now that I’ve grown, I often return in thought to that summer. Not just to remember—but to find my balance again. In my own kitchen, when I knead dough or rub oregano between my palms, I feel Maritsa beside me. When my loved ones grow impatient, I recall her words: “Slowly.” And when the world feels like it’s unraveling, I return to the notebook she gave me and read again my first childish thoughts, alongside her simple truths.

Perhaps that’s what keeps people alive inside us: not just memories, but the ways they lived that become our own. Maritsa, with her endurance and faith, planted roots within me. And every time I love, forgive, or persevere, they bloom anew.

Author’s Note

My grandmother, Maritsa, lived in a small village in Cyprus. She never traveled far, yet her presence reached deep into generations. This story is based on real summers spent with her—her cooking, her silence, her strength. I wrote it in loving memory, in response to the Reedsy Prompt: “Write a story about someone reminiscing on something that happened many summers ago.”