The time we save ourselves for at the end of the growing season could not be more different from the life we are juggling in our day to day of a year at Hillside. Three weeks away when most of the harvest is in, to a Dodecanese island that we have been visiting for well over a decade now. There is a simplicity in the repeat and the known and in how we then live there. A clarity in the spareness of the landscape and the life that makes its way there for the lack of water. We have old friends on the island with whom we pick up exactly where we left off and the familiarity allows a head start on the elasticity of the time that lies ahead.

If you are prepared for a 3 a.m. start and the first flight in the morning, you can be blinking in the bright light and catching the boat across the water to the island by mid-afternoon. We make our way up and immediately away from the little port, in a weather worn hire car that is waiting for us on the quay. Up and up the single-track switchback road to leave the monastery that grows from the cliff and the whitewashed town beneath us. Up and up until the road forks sharply. One way to the paleokastro, the other to the mountain.