Summer meant sea bathing. We shed the pale skin of winter, and toughened ourselves on brine. All health, my mother said, came from the salts of the sea. Religiously, we piled each day into Panayotis' ancient taxi and drive the eight miles to the beach at Laganas: my mother, my brother, my Aunt Dina, and my cousins, Stasa, Dimitrakis, and Viron. Each day, the sea scourged and purified us.
One of the things we shed in the sea was lice. These were picked up from school, the one place not subject to the laws of my mother's scrub bucket and sink. Lice were not just a nuisance. Diamantina, the dream-reader, told my mother how her husband, Razis, had picked up some very big ones in his male bush during his time in the army. They had sucked all the blood around his little bird, and that was why she, Diamantina, had never had children.
