Light pouring into the promise of fruit

I would keep returning to Greece just for the fruit.

Aromata kai chromata:  smells and colors... oh yes!

Today's selection

Small strawberries that taste like the platonic ideal of strawberries.

It isn't just fruit, either... octopi dry in the sun in front of a restaurant on Samos.  They need to be tenderized, traditionally by pounding on a rock.

I heard the phrase that titles this post on NPR once and found it so evocative of my food experience in Greece that I wrote it down and then looked it up.  It is a from a poem by Eavan Boland, and is about the Greek goddess of agriculture (Ceres, mother of Persephone, and the name after which we call all grains:  cereal):

CERES LOOKS AT THE MORNING (EXCERPT)

Eavan Boland

I wake slowly. Already
my body is a twilight: Solid. Gold.
At the edge of a larger darkness. But outside
my window
a summer day is beginning. Apple trees
appear, one by one. Light is pouring
into the promise of fruit.

Beautiful morning
look at me as a daughter would
look: with that love and that curiosity:
as to what she came from.
And what she will become.