The Groves of Episkopi Two days earlier Mihalis had asked me, 'Dooglahs, will you like to go to a sheep-shearing?' My eyebrows rose. 'Such a good idea!' I said. 'When?' 'Sunday at my cousins’ near Episkopi. They raise the sheep, I weave the wool.' Sunday’s Homer sailed no wine-dark sea. He parked his Audi under silver-green olive trees. Incoming sea breezes conjured no Polyphemus from distant hazes, only the scent of thyme. Shadows trembled on the ground. Mihalis’s cousins wore strong, stolid clothes. Work-faded pants, rolled-up sleeves, thick-soled boots made for olive-country’s rubble and thorn. Mihalis wore suspenders—dandyish for this part of Crete, but then, he was from Χανιά. The rest went in for dark, solid denims. Close-clipped hair. A few moustaches. The terse talk of men ready to work. Short laughs. A cough. Quick puffs from cigarettes tucked between the twigs of olive trees. The sheep cowered at the upper end of the pen, crowding as far as they could from the men. Bells clanged ferociously on the one sheep out of ten that had them, each a different tone so their shepherd would know who was where up there in the hills. Yet relentlessly the men came. They grabbed the young rams by the horns, the ewes by the ears, pulled the young ones away from the mothers, lifted the older rams—the ones that can put up a mean fight with their horns—clean into the air. Styles of shearing sheep revealed styles of character as surely as patterns of move in a chess match. A teenager with an thick shock of hair and missing bicuspid hoisted the sheep with one arm under
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