Left to the Cats

It was a sight I’d seen many times before. This one had chosen the quiet solitude of a mountain top overlooking Souda Bay. The ruin of it was beautiful. The bare stone had traces of white; scraps of flesh over bone. In youth, the building would have been handsome; the home of some romantic Adonis who had seen the view and knew his young wife would love it too. Now, tendrils of ivy twisted and seeped into cracks to pull the walls back to the earth.

The ceiling had fallen, the walls left at varying heights and the remains of a stone archway folded itself wearily over what once would have been the entrance to a courtyard. There was enough of a structure to see what the home would have once looked like. Images of Greek houses lining the bay below allowed me to fill in the gaps. Sky blue domes, wooden shutters, pottery urns filled with petals and climbing vines, a smooth, unblemished skin of white. We all saw the potential it had; we all heard the call of a retreat in the making; we all stopped and took a moment to dream. But the cats lay claim to it now as they rubbed their dusty bodies along the rough stones and sat atop the highest points to glare down at us in regal pride. As though sensing our ambitious visions of transformation, they had appeared from nowhere in droves, as though born from the crevices themselves, and as we left more came until the grounds of the ruin, inside and out, were crawling with pads and concealed claws.    

As our coach dismounted the mountain, winding around the snaking roads that hugged the cliffs, we passed an old woman, spine bent and feet shuffling, making her way to the top. Like so many others, she wore black from head to toe and carried in her hands a clutch of flowers. She was a woman on a pilgrimage, and as we passed her slowly I wondered at her destination. Was she climbing to lay her flowers at the foot of the tired archway? To shoo away the cats and sit a while in her long ago castle? To remember the hands of her husband as they had built and sculpted her precious wedding gift? We watched her painful journey until the next bend stole us away.