Home waters

On learning to love the (North) Sea

Right before I left Greece to go to university, my mother took me to buy a coat. The New England to which we had access through TV and films unfolded in a perpetual autumn. At the time, I did not know that the ‘wind chill’ temperature more closely reflected what weather feels like in a body. I had not yet heard of ‘leaf peeping’ as a seasonal activity, nor seen the online foliage maps that help eager visitors time their trip to coincide with the maples turning red. Importantly, I had not imagined what would happen after the season of sharp light: leaf piles giving way to snowdrifts, daybreak marked by a symphony of shovels and snowblowers, and Boston residents shamelessly saving their shovelled parking spots with household items, ranging from garden chairs to floor lamps to, memorably, a baby carrier (blessedly without the baby).

The coat my mother and I had picked out was seemingly the warmest available in Thessaloniki. In a checkered pattern and cinched at the waist, it was delightful—and it was absolutely no match for New England wind chill. Among Greeks, Thessaloniki has a reputation for majorly stylish women, the kind who put on lipstick to take the bins out. We even have a word for this type of woman: Thessalonikia, denoting not only a place of origin, but a way of being in the world, a mode of composure (with, perhaps, a garnish of excess). By the end of the first September in New England, this Thessalonikia was chilled to the bone, but the alternative—a puffy, airbag-like spacesuit of a jacket—was out of reach, as a matter of national pride, aesthetic preferences, and, crucially, funds.

I have spent nearly a decade of winters in New England, many of them in joyfully impractical footwear and inadequate coats. Even after a beloved mentor intervened and bought me a Proper Coat, I saved that gift for the subzero wind chills. When eyelashes freeze on contact with the wind, the puffy coat becomes permissible. All other conditions, I told myself, deserved at least a little bit of flair.

I first became aware of aging when I could no longer stand to be cold for the sake of style. There are photos of me in Boston blizzards in a flimsy camisole, standing next to friends also wearing camisoles with lacy trims (it was the early 2000s, forgive us). Nary a coat was in sight.

Two decades later, my life in Scotland is made possible by a portfolio of coats. There are wool coats for dry frost and waterproof jackets for sideways rain. There are gentle coats, almost non-coats, for July days, and there are fluorescent survival suits, the full-body kit required should you wish to accompany your friends on a bird-counting walk on the sixtieth parallel on Boxing Day.

Thessalonikia at sixty degrees north

I am a love migrant to Scotland. I moved here because I love a human who calls this place home, without having anticipated the love that I, too, would develop for the place itself and the many forms of life that inhabit it. These are mutually reinforcing loves, and my sense of home grows at their intersection.

My love of place is most alive in the encounter with light. “Look at the light!” is my language of affection. It is how my attention becomes material and transforms into language. Always accompanied by an exclamation point, “look at the light!” is my most consistent text message to friends far away and my invitation to those walking beside me. Across time zones and between homes, looking at the light is how I carry people along.

Amidst all the novelty when I first moved to Scotland, the light itself felt familiar. When Malachy drove us through the Wester Ross peninsula on my first road trip in the Highlands, the light in the glens felt qualitatively different than the sun warming the Mediterranean Sea. Yet, it was the same light that made me feel that I belonged here. I was not from this place, but I could be of it.

It was love of light, not fear of weather, that brought me to sensible coats. My desire to be in the light, to exclaim at it, to share it with others, outweighed the dampness and gales and the seemingly inviolable stylistic superstitions with which I was raised. When I branched out to Wellies and thermals (thermals! a revelation!), I became an all-weather walker. There is, however, one exception: This adaptability, this cheerful embracing of weather and surrender to place, only applies on land. When it comes to water, I still feel Greek to the bone.

I moved to Scotland right as the nature writing displays at bookshops were being populated with books about ‘wild swimming’ (which is really just ‘swimming’ —on this I will insist). I, too, read and loved some of these books, but I read them with the distance with which one can enjoy crime fiction without wanting to become a murderer (or, in this case, an outdoor swimmer at this latitude). My relationship to Scotland’s waters was one of companionable spectatorship: I gladly walked along the North Sea or beside the river Allan, and I happily sat by lochs while Malachy fished. The books I read to the sound of a line being cast into water occupy a special spot in the sonic memory of my early days of living here. This relationship to water did not, however, come with a desire to be immersed in it.

When it comes to leisure, Greeks can be notoriously fussy about the sea. Spoiled with the longest coastline on the Mediterranean, we are used to swimming in relatively warm, calm waters. Any hint of chop on the water’s surface is cause for consternation, and if more than one strand of seaweed is spotted at a time, a chorus of disapproving sighs rises from the shore. Our expectation of water is for it to be hospitable, to welcome, foster, and allow for life. The ideal sea conditions in Greek are known as λάδι, οr λαδιά, the literal translation of which is an oil stain. I was raised to yearn for still seas.

The one and only time I swam in a Scottish loch was not a hospitable encounter. It was, by Malachy’s account at least, a “roasting” day in Scotland (read: 18 degrees). We had been walking for hours in the moorland, lifting our legs over the heather. Malachy made it look effortless, but I struggled, feeling foreign to the landscape and to the ways of being in it. When the loch appeared, I threw myself in it with neither much preparation nor any pretence of grace. Where I had hoped to find relief, I encountered breathlessness.

Getting to know Scotland as a place, and getting to love it as a home, has required me to recognise that not all light is familiar light. Not all waters are home waters. Many sensations—the squelch of a boot on the sphagnum moss of a peat bog, the feeling of gale force wind on the hood of a coat— were new to me. The ground underfoot fosters different forms of life than the soil at my home of origin or the elements at other homes I have loved. The wind attaches differently here.

Negotiating a relationship with bodies of water at this home has also required reimagining hospitality. I know now that there is a way to enter the water in Scotland, and it does not even vaguely resemble my first attempt on that ‘scorcher’ of a Highland day. Crucially, it bears no kinship to how I enter the Aegean Sea. Unlike my home waters, swimming here is not an experience I can approach from memory. It requires, instead, a new process of acquaintance, enlivened by curiosity.

For years, that curiosity had dulled. The North Sea kindled no desire in me, the lochs stirred no yearning. I knew that, like me, these appetites (or the lack of them) were anchored in place. Proximity to my home waters, or even waters that resembled the Aegean in temperature and temperament, turns me into a swimmer again within minutes. Here in Scotland, though, I have been content to read on the beach in ‘summer thermals’ in July, with two rain jackets in tow just in case.

There is a kind of knowledge of place that builds through others’ loves, and a kind of love that reveals itself through contagion. “I am almost afraid to tell you this,” a friend texted cheekily early this summer, “but I have taken to cold water swimming.” He started inviting me to join him. “I am too much of a coward,” I insisted. Still, I kept a window open to the possibility. Then another friend, spurred by her friends, seemed to have found aliveness in jumping into tidal pools.

These waters too, foster life, but it is a different facet of life they illuminate. People strategise about how to get in and how long to stay in. They pack thermoses of tea or hot chocolate, and they turn on the car’s heated seats in preparation. They ask for ‘dry robes’ for Christmas. Immersion in this water does not come with the languid hug of the Mediterranean, or the feeling of a wet bathing suit drying on the straw chair of a seaside tavern. It comes with the invigorating, almost seizing jolt of the North Sea. And it also comes with togetherness.

All summer long, with increasing persistence and frequency, invitations came to meet people by the water. Might I want to get in? Perhaps I’ll walk there with you, watch your stuff while you swim, I would reply.

I have watched a lot of bags and coats while my friends shrieked in the sea this year. Neither the bags nor the coats require watchfulness, but they are giving me the gift of time, of acclimating to an idea. Standing on the shoreline, I am incubating a self, hatching the next chapter of a relationship to place. I have gained a lot of layers and shed a lot of selves at different homes over the years, and I have become porous to what there is to love. Holding on to my attachment to my home waters in Greece is perhaps the last tether that makes me recognisable to my home of origin.

The window to swim outdoors without a wetsuit is closing, a friend told me recently, half-gently, half-ominously. If I was going to get in, the time is now.

I know I will miss the window this season. I know, too, that imaginations of homes and their corresponding waters are elastic, that we can learn to love different kinds of aliveness. By the time I next switch out the winter thermals for their summer equivalents, there might well be a tidal pool here for me.

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(More) words on light

Earlier this summer, when I was decidedly not swimming in Scotland, I wrote about gardens and grief and care and, of course, light on Women Write the Balkans. Enormous thanks to Ana and Lea for being wonderful stewards of words.