Early 20's, my best friend Sophie's parents were sending her to Greece for the summer. My first response was: well what am I going to do without you?
Her response was: why not come?
First response to that was no, obviously, I can't. The list was long, I was in university, I had no money, and then I really thought about it.
I remembered my Canada Savings Bonds. My grandparents had left them to me and I had never touched them — the kind of thing you're supposed to leave alone, sitting quietly in a drawer being sensible on your behalf. I cashed them in and bought a ticket.
I had my been working on my scuba dive master. I had a dive job semi lined up. I packed my gear and got on the plane.
Athens, twenty-five years ago
The domestic terminal in Athens, twenty-five years ago, was an education. There were chickens. People smoked on the planes. Lines were not a concept anyone present had agreed to — you simply moved toward the thing you wanted and hoped to arrive at it before the plane did.
Sophie had gone ahead — this being the actual phone days, when arranging to meet someone in another country meant deciding a thing in advance and then simply believing in it.
And then there was Jon.
Sophie's brother had landed on the island months before us, doing his own thing, living his own life, entirely unaware that his sister and her friend were about to arrive. I laugh when I think of the three of us in a one-room apartment in the kind of Greek heat that melts. Sophie tells me I slept in genuinely deranged positions. We ate Greek salads and fresh bread on the patio, and I can still taste that bread.
Jon — in hindsight, I am SO SORRY. You had a life. A room. Presumably plans. Then your sister and her friend moved into all three. Three people, one room, no air conditioning, Greek summer. Costa the bartender next door! This is the first apology I've ever issued and twenty-five years is not a fast turnaround.
At the time it did not cross my mind once that we might be an imposition. I was too busy making bold decisions and living my life.
The dive job fell through
It did. I had the certification, I had the gear, I had flown across the world for it, and it wasn't really a thing. On to the next: I landed a job at a local landmark — called the Magic Mushroom bar, no less — where I waitressed.
No mushrooms. Just drinks. I want to be clear about that, because my friend Gillian used to send me packages and every single one of them got searched. Every one. I have never worked out why - lol!
Gillian is the other thing that island gave me — one of those soul-mate connections you don't go looking for and can't manufacture. I ended up working for her. She loved snorkeling, beaches, and attempting to waterski as much as I did. Her boyfriend Peter owned the place, and between the two of them I got to experience the island as a bit of a local. Between summers we wrote actual letters — pen, paper, envelope, then weeks of waiting to hear what someone thought about something that had already stopped being true. I would run to the mailbox looking for a letter from Greece!
Andrea, Sophie, Gillian and Tory outside the Magic Mushroom — four floaties, four girls, one beach day.
Everybody bought their own. Still one of my favourite days.
The rose petals
The bouzouki clubs are the thing I still can't put into words properly.
They'd stopped the glass-breaking, I guess because too many people were getting hurt. It was literally Greek to me! They sold trays of rose petals, and we'd dance on the tables while the petals came down over us. Thousands of them, through the heat and the noise.
Other nights, at the dance bars, the glasses & plates still got broken.
I've never worked out what it is about dancing like that — the volume, the heat, the petals, the crash — that lands so deep. But it does. It goes somewhere words don't reach and it stays there.
The second summer
I loved it enough to go back.
Year two I lived on the beach at Argassi, on my own, and drove a purple Vespa. I spent my days barefoot. I snorkeled — sometimes six hours at a stretch, until we came out absolute prunes, because the water was so warm and so floaty that getting out of it felt like a decision you'd need a reason for.
They said don't pet the cats, you'll get ringworm. I pet the cats. I got ringworm. Thankfully Gillian took me to a doctor and translated — he had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth mid worm-leg-check, prescribed me some meds, and away it went. My thigh looked branded with a perfect circle for a few weeks.
I still pet the cats.
And out past the shallows, where the shelf drops away and the sun hits it full on, there's a blue I have spent twenty-five years failing to describe.
It isn't aqua. Aqua is the pretty shallow stuff over the sand — lovely, and a completely different thing. It isn't teal either, and teal is my favorite colour on earth, so I don't say that lightly — teal has green in it and this doesn't. It isn't navy, which is what blue turns into when the light gives up. It's saturated and lit from the inside and it will not sit still. If you've seen it you already know, and if you haven't, no adjective I own is going to get you there.
This is it. The bay we swam in — that exact blue. Capri.
Why it isn't called Zakynthos
I used to name pieces after beaches I loved. I gave it up for entirely unromantic reasons: nobody could say them back to me. Greek place names are beautiful and they do not survive a phone call, a market stall, or the back of a jewelry tag.
So the blue became Capri. Five letters. The name comes from the Mediterranean itself rather than from any one beach of mine — short enough to fit anywhere, easy enough that someone can ask for it out loud without rehearsing first.
Years later I honeymooned in Italy for three weeks, and found the same water waiting on the other side of the same sea. I was on Procida — a small island in the Bay of Naples — when the towers came down on September 11th. That's its own memory, and not one for this post, but it does mean that when I say this blue has followed me around, I mean it fairly literally.
It's a compromise of a name and I've made my peace with it. Every Capri piece I make is that same water — the deep part, past the shelf, in full sun. Not the postcard. The dive.
The Cleo pyramid necklace in Capri blue — same water, twenty-five years on.
What it actually cost
I worked seven days a week. I had enough for rent, food and the Vespa, and that was the entire budget. Some days I barely had enough for the food part.
I would do it again in a heartbeat.
It taught me something I've never been able to un-learn: I don't need the clothes, the car, the brag. What I needed turned out to be a beach, an apartment, a Vespa, good friends, and late nights that ran from sunset straight through to sunrise.
And no cell phones. None. It was me, on an island, genuinely unreachable — which is a thing almost nobody under forty has ever experienced and which I'm not sure I could do now.
It was also not a montage. The highs were enormous and the lows were just as big. The good days felt like a dream I was somehow inside of. The bad days felt very low and very far away, and on those days all I wanted in the world was home.
Both of those are true at once. That's what the island was.
Me and my friend Gina. Twenty-five years later we still keep in touch.
The part that explains everything else
Here's the thing I've only worked out in hindsight: Capri isn't the exception. The whole line comes from this.
I started young. When I was in grade four my parents took us to live in Australia for a year on a teachers' exchange, and that was the taste — the moment I understood that there were other places and I was allowed to go to them. I've been adventuring ever since, mostly toward beaches.
And on every trip I've bought jewelry. Not as souvenirs, exactly. It took me years to notice what I was actually doing.
My memory is genuinely not good. It never has been — I think it's the creative brain, so much alive at once that not all of it gets filed. Names go. Details go. Whole months go.
But the jewelry doesn't. I put a piece on and the recall is physical — not a picture in my head but a feeling in my body, the temperature of the air and the sound of the place and who I was at the time. It's the most reliable memory I own and it lives in my hands rather than my head.
So that's what goes into each collection. Not a trend, not a colour of the season. A feeling I'm trying to hand over — the one travel gives you, that particular loosening, the version of yourself that turns up when you're somewhere new and barefoot and don't have a plan.
I encouraged my kids to travel for exactly this reason. My daughter has found her own version of it in Paris, and watching that happen has been its own quiet reward. Plus I get to tag along!
I went to Greece because my best friend was leaving for the summer, and because there was maybe a scuba job. I came home with a story I could not have imagined and a whole way of working I wouldn't understand for years.
Cash in the bonds.
Athens, with the Acropolis behind me.
Early twenties, and about to find out what the summer had planned instead.
Wear the water
Capri runs through the Glass & Light collection — the line I design and assemble myself, here in Calgary, which is about as far from the Ionian as a person can get without real effort. That's probably the point.
Drops, pendants, huggies, spikes. Same blue every time, on purpose.
Keep the plating out of pools and salt water and it'll stay bright for years — full routine in the jewelry care guide. Which, given where the colour came from, is a genuinely annoying instruction to have to give.
Mystic Soul Jewelry — Canadian small business, Calgary, Alberta, since 2008.
