The ferry from Santorini takes a little under three hours, and the wind arrives before the island does.
You feel it first as a change in the boat. Then everybody standing outside stops trying to hold their hair down and simply lets it happen.
By the time Mykonos comes up out of the water, it is already doing the thing it is known for, which is being extremely windy and behaving as though that is your problem.
I had forgotten that.
I have been here before, years ago now, in a different part of my life, and what I remembered was the light and the noise.
Not the wind.
The wind is the whole island.
It has a name. The meltemi. It blows down through the Aegean in summer and into September, dry and hard and from the north, and everybody here discusses it the way other places discuss rain.
We came in early afternoon and it was still swimming weather. Late September and the sea is warm, which is the trick of this month. The air has started to cool and the water has not caught up yet, so you get in expecting the shock and it never comes.
I swam before I unpacked anything.
Salt dried on my arms while I walked back up, and I put linen over it and did not wash it off until the evening, which I think is the correct way to spend a September afternoon and I will not be taking questions.
In town the lanes are deliberately confusing.
They do not run straight anywhere. They fold back, narrow, turn corners that seem to have no reason to be corners. The whitewash goes over almost everything, including the paving, so the edges of the steps have to be painted another colour or you would fall down them.
I was told years ago that the town was built this way to confuse pirates.
I have repeated that to people.
Standing in it again, I am not entirely sure anybody knows whether that is true or whether it is just very good wind engineering. Both, possibly. A lane that breaks the meltemi also breaks a line of sight.
Either way, it works.
You cannot see anything coming.
Including the sea.
You turn a corner and suddenly the lane ends and there it is, right there, with houses standing almost in it.
That row is called Little Venice, and I have no intention of explaining it to you, partly because I do not know enough about it and partly because the pleasure of it is that nobody sensible would put houses there.
Balconies hang over the water. On a rough day the spray reaches the tables.
People sit at those tables anyway.
Above them, on the low hill, are the windmills.
There are five in a row, white and round with pointed roofs, and they are the photograph everybody has already seen.
I had seen them.
I had never thought about them once.
Then somebody said the island used to have nearly thirty.
That stopped me.
Five is a picture.
Thirty is an industry.
So I asked.
It turns out the windmills were not romantic at all. They ground grain. Mykonos sat on a busy sailing route, and one of the things produced here was paximadi, the twice-baked barley bread made hard enough to keep.
Hard enough, incidentally, to hurt you.
I ate one three days ago on a different island, in a sequinned dress, because I was hungry and it was there.
I thought it was a snack.
It was ship food.
That made the windmills much more interesting to me.
All evening people were climbing the hill to photograph these beautiful white buildings against the sunset, and all I could think was that they were machinery once.
The prettiest view in Mykonos was a workplace.
By seven the light was going gold and then pink, and then it went quickly, the way it does out here. The whole hill filled with people waiting for it.
I did not mind them.
It is a good thing to want to look at.
I had changed by then. The salt was gone and I was in something long and pale, because it is that kind of island in the evening and I have never pretended otherwise.
The wind took it sideways the entire time.
Every photograph is essentially a photograph of the meltemi with a woman somewhere inside it.
We ate late. Fish, lemon, too much bread, the cheap wine you always tell yourself you will look up the name of.
Walking back, the lanes had emptied and the wind had dropped. Somewhere above us a bar was playing something I knew.
Not the version I knew. A slower one.
I stood in the lane for a minute like an idiot trying to work out where I had heard it.
Then I decided I did not want to know and kept walking.
Three days here.
Tomorrow I am going out to Delos, which is the reason I came, and which I suspect is going to make the windmills look recent.
V.
More images from Mykonos
