How my life has influenced my writing

I was born and raised in beautiful California in a seaside town called Santa Cruz. I had a very happy childhood, in a Greek family and with the best that the United States could offer: incredible schools and teachers. I shall always be indebted to those teachers who influenced me and helped me to form my character and to LEARN. They did a great job and worked conscientiously.

Santa Cruz is blessed with a lovely coastline and mountains dense with redwoods. Our home was on the outskirts of town, where there were few houses but many vast fields with grazing horses, cattle, and goats. I have memories of lying in bed at night and hearing the neighing of neighborhood horses and the mooing of cattle. As children, during the carefree summer months we explored nearby forests and always returned with swollen faces and red rashes on our arms and legs from poison ivy. And when the cattle escaped from their fenced enclosures in the neighborhood, we felt it our duty to drive them back in with sticks in our hands. We also befriended an old man who had many horses but needed the help of young hands to clean their stables and brush them down. We gladly volunteered and our reward was to take them out riding.

It is a wonder we did not break our necks falling off them while learning to ride.

In addition, my father would often take us to the mountains on horse riding tours and to hike and to feed the deer. I believe it reminded him of the mountainous area of central Greece where he was from, in the prefecture of Fokida.

Our house and yard in Santa Cruz were always alive with animals: ducks, chickens, cats, rabbits, a lamb, and a dog. Together with my siblings we were responsible for their feeding and care. Both my parents grew up with pets. My father lived in a small, rural village, high in the mountains that did not have electricity or running water until the 1970s. They depended on their animals for survival and for farm work. My mother grew up in Athens before the war (WWII) when it was still a small city with its rivers and verdant hills, and the topography had surprisingly not changed drastically from ancient times. (Sadly, today the topography is unrecognizable). Her family always had a dog and sometimes goats and chickens that they kept at their summer home near the sea. My mother often told us the story of one of their dogs Jack. During the German invasion of Greece and especially during the winters of starvation, Jack was a victim of hunger. There was not enough food to feed the family let alone their pet. Her memory of him was so full of sorrow it followed her into old age.

When I was growing up in Santa Cruz both my parents often entertained us with stories of their lives as well as stories and myths of their homeland Greece. As a very young child, I had confused the different eras and they were grouped all together in an indefinite period of time where revolutionary fighters of 1821 stood side by side with heroes of classical and mythical Greece. When I was in the sixth grade of elementary school, my father, in an effort to

cultivate my knowledge of Greek history handed me Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War with his advice to ‘read it’.

Coming to Greece in 1979, with dreams of exploring as many archaeological sites and museums as possible, I moved into my grandfather’s one hundred year old house in the center of Athens, just a fifteen minute walk today from the Acropolis Museum! This is the house my mother grew up in and it has been in our family for four generations now. It has also, through the years, been full of pets!

Article by Joanna Karachristos