children were taught to be kind to wild life and animals, but they never had a pet in the house.
Malama used to tell her children, her pets were producers of foods like milk, meat and eggs.
She had so many mouths to feed she just could not see feeding a cat or a dog. This woman had lived through a horrific earthquake that took her baby sister and her beloved father. She had also lived through the three seemingly-like endless wars with the enemy outside her door. Who can blame her for not wanting to feed a real pet that did not produce any food for her enormous growing family?
The four brothers shared the one basement room. They had bunk beds.
At dinner time the house was full, noisy and busting at the seams. Once they were all seated, the radio would be on, playing soft music. They took their turn talking quietly. Food was plenty, and a pot was always on the stove, filling the home with such wonderful vegetable and herbal scents. Malama always had her dinner meal planned and cooked by 12:00 noon. The meals were mostly vegetarian with added seafood a couple of times per week and meat on Sundays.
On the stove, there was always a secondary pot, a heavy-duty tea pot. Sideritis is a wild, very fragrant mountain Greek tea. Everyone drank from it. The last person that served himself had to make more tea for the next several people. They would sweeten it with honey and of course the father’s lemons from his trees. Their mother used to say, that tea would make them strong as iron. Sideron is iron.
Truly, that tea has many benefits. No one went hungry in that home. Their vitamins and minerals came from their fresh and wholesome unprocessed foods they ate.
When occasionally anyone would get sick, their mother would nip it in the bud with her herbal medicinal teas, her natural remedies, homemade chicken soup and loving hands.
If anyone ever had a cold in their lungs she would heat special round glassware and place them on the sick person’s upper back, behind the chest. There, the round glasses created a vacuum. After a while she would pull them off gently making a popping sound. They were called ventouzes. These ventouzes pulled out the inflammation.
Another remedy was camphor cubes. They were placed in a little cloth bag and safety pinned in the sick child’s undershirt. It became a priority when a child came down with something. She would stop it from spreading to the rest of her brood. Basically, the family was healthy. Amazingly, no one ever had a broken bone or an illness that required a surgery in a hospital.
There was one time though, on election night when Efrossini was about seven years old and was playing with the renter’s child in the front apartment when an accident took place. In a tall floor umbrella stand, there were some ornamental peacock feathers. The children used those feathers with the renter mother’s permission to decorate their heads as fancy hats.
Little Efrossini had climbed a chair in front of an ice box to look at herself in the mirror hanging on the wall, on top of the small ice box. Climbing on the way down, her outer right thigh got caught on that fancy, chrome, sharp, water faucet on the ice box door. Efrossini’s leg was cut wide open to the bone. She fell and passed out on the cold hard ceramic floor.
Later she was told two of her brothers picked her up off the tile floor and took her to her divani.
Efrossini opened her eyes temporarily and witnessed everyone crying around her, like she had died. Instead of taking her to the emergency room at the hospital, someone poured some type of an antiseptic liquid in that huge open fresh wound. The pain was so intense she nearly died. She passed out again.
By morning they took her to the hospital. There the doctor told them they should have brought Efrossini as soon as the accident took place. They could have sewn the wound then. Now he said: I must staple it and that would leave her a large scar. She is a girl who should not have a scar like that.
Little Efrossini remembers the many nights and days she had to spend in her divani in pain from that wound. She missed a couple of weeks of school too. That was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. That was the time they found out also, Efrossini could not swallow any kind of pill.
She remembers her father getting so angry with her because she could not swallow the pain pills the doctor had prescribed to her.
Her father crushed the pills and watched her swallow them like a hawk those terribly bitter, sour the most horrible things she had ever put in her mouth. She never forgot that night, the two weeks of school she missed and that awful pain. After she recovered she ended up with an ugly scar on her thigh.
Efrossini remembers taking empty, clean, folded neatly, brown paper bags a few doors down to the neighborhood grocery store. There, the family had a tab in the winter for some absolute necessities, like coffee, salt, black pepper, sugar, toilet paper and toothpaste.
The friendly grocer and family friend Pericles would give her a tiny bag of fresh fruit or candy for the recycled paper bags, a real treat for a young girl. This was usually done in the winter. They had a bounty of fresh everything in the summer.
She also remembers sleeping in the living room on a metal spring divani (sort of a cot) with no headboard or footboard, but with just a mattress on it. It was covered with hand-embroidered white sheets and a pillow case her mother made.
During the day, a beautiful damask-type bedspread adorned that cot that matched the walnut table’s tablecloth which her mother had sewn. Their formal dining room table, which seated a dozen people, was the centerpiece of the large living room.
The cot (her divani) was against the wall, and during the day it also served as a sitting area too. On the wall behind this divani, there was a large six by eight-foot hand embroidered hanging. It was customary to hang such an item there to make the wall by the bed cozy.
The older sisters embroidered it for the home. The material was burlap and the colorful yarn was wool. This was a one-year long project for the older girls, Roula and Soula. It depicted a wildlife scene from a forest, dotted with wild animals of deer, rabbits and one owl. This wall hanging being wool was a warming welcome at night for Efrossini.
She remembers feeling the warmth of the wool, by running her hands up and down the wall hanging.
At the end of the divani, stood a tall, glossy, mint green and medium blue, five drawer bureau. This was a very interesting accent piece. This item was really a wooden, well-crafted trunk sent from America by Efrossini’s aunt, full of clothes, toys, and candy.
Once, they even found a tasty nut and fruit cake in a beautiful, colorful tin, which her mother Malama cherished. The tin was very large and it looked like stained glass. It was beautiful.
For the holidays Malama would bake kourambiethes (Greek cookies, drenched in white powdered sugar with almonds,) they were crunchy throughout and placed them in this decorative tin. In the Thessaloniki house, Malama had a special china closet in the living room where she stored the home-made sweets, cookies in tight fitting tins and her glass jars that were full of fruit preserves. This piece of furniture was locked, and only she had the key.
There were a lot of sweet toothed children in this family. Before she started locking it, this china closet was constantly raided by the children.
One day Malama reached in the china closet to bring out treats for her guests and she found out there were none. She was embarrassed that day. After a lecture to the kids, she started locking the china closet.
Malama used to say touch "the donkey with the stick" and "the children with the words."
She
