9 1/2 Months

Where else in the world would one consider one’s business day to be hugely successful, cause for celebration in fact, purely because one has managed to get a spare key cut. Granted it wasn’t a task that we pursued with persistent enthusiasm or even monotonous regularity, but we had, on and off, on several dozen occasions taken our key into the city of Hydra with us on the off chance that the island’s sole key cutter was in.

The key-cutting operation is situated in the corner of one of our carpenter’s shops, and due to the nature of their business, being that they may be out fitting doors or windows, they do not keep regular hours. So, more often than not, the shop wasn’t even open when we passed by.

When we did find it open, the key-cutting expert, Spiros, wasn’t there. “Come back in half an hour,” was the standard answer. We did, many times, but our half-hour and his didn’t coincide—for nine and a half months.

To be fair, if the matter had been urgent, we could have waited at the carpenter’s for a few hours or, indeed, taken a boat to Ermioni or Athens and had the key cut, but it was simply something we had on our “to-do” list while in town. This month we were able to tick that item off—almost.

While we couldn’t believe our luck in finding the aforementioned service open, and the expert in situ, things still didn’t go quite to plan. After much rummaging through miscellaneous boxes, it turned out he only had one spare key of our type. We had hoped to get two spare house keys cut—just in case.

We have ordered another and expect, with good fortune and synchronised time pieces, it will be done by November.

Jennifer

Jennifer first arrived on the Rock at the age of 10, after her father, Michael, bought a house above Hydra’s port. While she lived in Virginia year-round with her mother, Jeanne, and stepfather, Steve, she visited Hydra with her father every summer for a month, in her younger years tripping along the port chasing kitties, then later tripping home from Cavos to make her curfew (father had threatened to call the “police” if she was even a minute late).