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up a spray that further filters its landscape, softens it, makes it appear to float. But here on the island, even when the sky is as cloudy as it is today, every view is severe with detail. The shadow of a rock a mile off on the Peloponnesian shore appears as well defined as the lemon tree just outside my window. And because Hydra rises from its main port in a steep, horseshoe-shaped hill that is girded with houses, everyone is an innocent spectator to private scenes in remote courtyards and terraces.
    At this moment I spy a middle-aged woman in a floral-­patterned housecoat hanging out her laundry while carrying on a lively conversation with a brown-and-white cat perched on her garden wall; two terraces above her, I see a pair of grade school children sitting cross-legged under their garden door’s awning, one pulling a picture book from his backpack, the other biting into a chunk of bread slathered with honey; and at the top of the hill, I can clearly make out a tall and portly Orthodox priest in black robe and chimney-pot hat sitting stoically on his garden bench while his diminutive wife, standing just behind him, lectures him, possibly about some item he failed to purchase on his morning trip to the port.
    This is the celebrated trick of Hydra light: it transforms daily life into intimate theater.
    In the whitewashed nineteenth-century house where I am staying, all the windows are screened with two crossed iron bars. “To keep the Turks out,” some islanders say. “To keep Albanian pirates out,” say others. Clearly these iron bars work: neither Turk nor Albanian has clambered into my room. The bars do not obscure the view from my desk window; rather they frame it into four discrete images: a hill studded with houses in one frame, a grove of almond trees in another, the harbor, the sea.
    My lodging is high on the hill. Through the harbor frame, I now view the terrace of Dimitri’s taverna, and it is empty. The clouds threaten rain, so I imagine that Tasso and his tablemates are either inside the café or skipping today’s symposium.
    But rain or not, I am hungry. As the figs in the hanging mesh basket in my room are in that awkward stage between fresh and dried, I set off for Dimitri’s taverna, passing Tasso’s house along the way. I catch a glimpse of him, sitting alone on his third-story terrace, where he appears deep in thought.
    â€”
    The only people inside Dimitri’s are Dimitri himself, sitting in the kitchen and listening to the BBC World Service news and, at the far end of the dining area, by the window, his eighty-year-old father, Ianos, who is reading yesterday’s Athenian newspaper while playing with his
kombolói
, a loop of thirty-three amber beads that are known in English as worry beads.
    Like many of the island’s men, Dimitri was a sailor when he was younger. He worked his way up to ship’s radio operator, a job at which he picked up fluent English and a smattering of other languages, both Western and Eastern. When he reached his midthirties, he returned permanently to Hydra, opened his taverna, and married the local woman he had hired as his cook. The idea that life has natural, discrete stages comes intuitively to Dimitri.
    I realize I have seen far fewer men fingering worry beads than when I first came to the island in the 1960s, and I ask Dimitri if that tradition is fading. Before responding, he signals for me to select my meal from the open metal trays at the front of the kitchen. As always I have a choice between moussaka, stuffed zucchinis, pastitsio (a Greek macaroni and cheese, with ground meat, which got its name from the Italian
pasticcio
, meaning “hodgepodge,” a term that could describe most Greek dishes), and Dimitri’s pièce de résistance, roasted lamb with potatoes. I spring for the lamb, despite the fact that a small party of flies is cavorting in its gravy. Dimitri turns off the radio, serves me up a