Coming of Age in Χανιά 'Yasou, Dooglahs!' Mihalis hailed to me as I passed the bzzzpthump-thump of his shop. His voice was so sharp it wasn’t a passing halloo. 'Yasas,' I said, 'Tikanete.' 'Kalaaaaaahh.' The way he said it, it meant, 'Good, but better than good.' He was sitting on the multihued blanket of the guests’ bench. I looked around as my eyes adjusted to the dark interior and was taken aback. Anya was working the loom! I recalled the afternoon when Mihalis was lamenting the loss of his craft, and now there she was. 'Anya, I didn’t know you wove!' 'So! Now you do,' she giggled in that contralto nightingale voice of hers. Her slender fingers were manoeuvring the shuttle bobbin through the maze of the warp and woof, on the near side of the upper strands for six or seven threads, then to the far side of the lower strands for a carefully counted number more, meticulously working her way across the hundreds of threads that made up the its width, adding one more line to a pattern that, when the carpet was done and one day lying on a floor, this line so carefully counted would never be noticed amid the design of the whole. There, in one place and for one moment, Anya at the loom was the timelessness of weaving on a scale I could behold. A man and a woman and a loom and a land. If not for unexpected glimpses, such truths I would never see. 'How long have you been doing this?'
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