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what is this nonsense?

The Tender Year is an interactive collection of writing and artwork from around the world, by Naomi Krupitsky Wernham and Sam Galison.

The home page is a map, showing each entry at its geographic location, with all the entries connected in chronological order. You can click and drag to move the map, or scroll up and down to zoom in and out. Clicking on any of the black dots will take you to the entries for that place.

If an interactive map isn’t your cup of tea, we made a page that’s just a list with all our entries (most recent first).

We’re also on instagram: @studiogalison and @naomikrupitsky.

The Peloponnese

August 29th, 2018

By mid-August, we were racing around the Peloponnese, which is a small and beautiful handprint of earth and sea just southwest of Athens. We came for Epidavros, the ancient theater where they still put on Ancient Greek plays; we stayed for the ridiculous turquoise color of the ocean there.

We were subjected, suddenly, to what felt like a whole world of travel-induced contradictions; we developed a desperate que será será attitude fueled by mild chaos and strong Greek coffee. The following is a very important list of things we had to say, loudly, arms flung into (we assumed) a void of some kind:

  1. Well, if the assholes at the rental car place get here too late and we miss our flight, then we miss our flight!
  2. So the water was infested with jellyfish. So what? We managed to swim away from them, and besides, we could see a 4th century temple to Hera from the water, so wouldn’t a jellyfish sting or two have been worth it?
  3. Okay, well, that’s the second hotel today that has cancelled our reservation for tonight – we have google! We’ll find another!
  4. I mean, at least the club downstairs is playing okay music, and besides, the bed is comfortable, so if we can’t sleep all night, we can’t sleep.

All of it a weird kind of surrender, and by the end, one overarching moment of clarity: So Greece is easy now; we know the traffic patterns and how to get a check in a restaurant; we slip under the ocean like it is air, anything; we are expert at quick-picking our way down a jagged rock face masquerading as a beach. We have just gotten comfortable. In time to leave for India.

I think we will always hold Greece up as the pinnacle of a summer spent chasing after the embodiment of stories we love. They hold their stories holy here too; the whole Mediterranean singing. It is rich here. It is wine and olive oil everywhere; honey and bee stings. It wears its heart on its sleeve. We are stretched thin. We are washed like beach pebbles against each other. We are pointed into the wind, or caught out in the rain, or we are dashed against the ocean cliffs. But the water is worth it.