Jimmy and Eleni

We had some wonderful friends on Rhodes, Greece.  Jimmy and Eleni were just like angels.  We met Eleni, when we went to Greek classes at a nearby centre.  My depressing attempts to learn Greek were disheartening.  Despite my best attempts to memorise words for homework, my brain was incapable of keeping this information for any degree of time.  As a result, after months of classes my Greek was worse than awful and even the newcomers from Albania or Russia were outstripping me within weeks of starting.  But the best part of that class was Eleni.  She was Greek and a lovely radiant 60 year old.  She attended the classes to help with our pronunciation and her kindness was a salve.  Gradually, we got to meet her husband Jimmy another wonderful soul.  They lived in Koskinou and had a lovely house in a huge garden of fruit trees.  Sitting having coffee in their garden with the apricots hanging over us was heavenly.  Eleni did a good turn everyday in her father’s name.  Such a sweet thing to do in memory of someone you love.  We would arrive home to our flat to find a huge bag of fresh delicious fruit hanging on our door handle.  Or the day my youngest son learnt his first Greek word (it happened to be the Greek word for watch) and she bought him a small watch to encourage him to learn more!  Jimmy and Eleni are wonderful people inside and out.  Such a privilege to know them and I hug myself in glee to know they are on Rhodes cultivating a fertile garden out back and radiating love and kindness to all they encounter.