subtitleESSAY There is nothing more irrepressibly badass than the old women of southern Greece. They have never seen a dentist. They can clean their own teeth, thank you very much, all two of them. They are familiar with loss. Waking up every morning before the unforgiving sun can shine through the window, they dress from head to toe in thick, black clothing that doesn’t let in the light — of the day or of the spirit. The black attire signifies the status of a widow, of a stoic; mourning is only displayed through the color of clothing, never through emotion. The women are like the olive trees, which reside in soil so dry that it crunches under your feet as you walk. Somehow, they manage to grow anyway; persistence and stubborn endurance are all they know. The trees can grow through rock, live without rain. They stagger, twisting and turning toward the heights despite the farmer’s careless pruning; the mere matter of amputated limbs will not stop them. When I was 5 or 6, I thought that my Yaya was the most beautiful woman in the world, with her wiry white hair fresh out of curlers and laugh lines showing around her eyes like a map of all of her times spent smiling. She used to sing a song called “Μαρία με τα Κίτρινα,” “Maria in Yellow,” and we would laugh because Yaya also had a yellow dress, but she did not emulate the risqué behavior of Maria, who couldn’t decide whom she loved more, “τον άντρα σου ή τον γείτονα” her husband or her next-door neighbor. As I got older, I realized that there are more worry lines than laugh lines. Deep trenches of lineaments cross her forehead, revealing the hardships of a childhood spent in poverty. More prominent than her crow’s feet are the wrinkles etched into her eyelids, from squeezing her eyes tightly shut, trying to block out the pain of having her daughter taken from her, after only 18 years on this earth, by the unrelenting grip of an untimely death. The most recent are the lines chiseled around her thin mouth, as if out of marble. They are from pursing her lips in an attempt to suppress the pain after my Papou was taken by the same merciless hands that took her daughter away, but this time, those hands looked like cancer. The yellow dress went away after Papou died. As did the levity with which we used to make fun of Maria’s foolish infidelity. The black clothes are suffocating; they invite the sun to beat down with more cruelty than before. Once the sun starts to set and the day cools, my Yaya and the other women of the village venture out of their homes, carrying olive-oil lamps to their husbands’ graves, the lineaments of their faces illuminated by the lanterns. The lines are unforgiving, the trenches have been dug, the stalemate between the want of joy around the eyes and the stubborn endurance of suffering around the silent lips wages on. However, I know a secret. When the sun sets in southern Greece, it rains. No matter how helpless the olive trees look, rain will come. When Yaya gets home from the cemetery, she closes the shutters and peels off the black clothes, folding them carefully and placing them on the dresser, next to Papou’s old bifocals. Yaya has a secret drawer of floral nightgowns that she only wears when the day has ended and the sun can no longer punish her misfortune. Maria’s yellow dress is long gone, but the pinks and blues and purples are still there. I like to think that the other widows also have secret stashes of light, brightly colored clothing. The olive trees flourish and yield fruit despite the oppression of the sun. There can be beauty in spite of loss.