Instead, we moved right past the love affair into the marriage. From the start our relationship with Greece was a serious one. The water pipes froze every night. The phone and electricity didn't work when it rained, as it did in torrents through February and March. We spent a full week in February huddled in front of the olive-wood fire keeping warm next to racks of wet laundry.
Heating oil is three or four times more expensive in Greece than it is in America.
What we deduced meteorlogically was borne out politically. Steve was teaching at Ionian University for the Fulbright Foundation, and for months during the conflict in Bosnia, he looked out from his classroom onto the decks of French and American aircraft carriers. Among them was the Theodore Roosevelt , which this past May mounted attacks on Serbia from the Ionian Sea. When he expressed our nervousness about the political instability in the Balkans to his students, wondering if it was safe for our children to be in Corfu, they pointed out that in Greece we were much safer always than in America. Greeks, they told him, do not carry hand guns.