Meet Eleni, tarot reader: profile and story

The winter Eleni was nine, her father’s fishing boat went missing in a storm for three days. Every night she sat at the end of the pier watching the sea, and every night her grandmother Despina came out with a blanket and sat beside her without a word. On the third night her grandmother pointed to the moon slipping out between the clouds. “Waiting is a kind of reading too,” she said. “Watch the moon fill a little every night, and you learn when to reach out your hand.” The next morning her father’s boat limped into the harbour with one sail torn.

Eleni grew up and left the island. In Athens she spent ten years as a translator, carrying other people’s words into other languages. She loved finding the exact word, yet she slowly lost the words for her own heart. In the spring she turned thirty-one, word came that her grandmother was dying, and as she boarded the last ferry home she realised how long it had been since she had looked up at the moon.

Her grandmother passed away at dawn the day after Eleni arrived. Clearing the house, Eleni found a tarot deck wrapped in linen at the back of the wardrobe — cards her grandmother, whom she had thought read only coffee grounds, had quietly cherished all her life. A dry olive leaf was tucked against the Moon card, and on its back, in her grandmother’s shaky handwriting, were the words: “The day Eleni comes home.”

Eleni never went back to Athens. On her wrist she wears a bracelet shaped like a branch from her grandmother’s olive grove, and around her neck a silver moon. In the evenings she still lays out cards for people waiting for the ferry, from a corner table of the harbour café — never rushing, listening to the end, taking one breath with a soft “so…” before she speaks.

She ends every reading the same way: tell me again next time; the moon is always here. Sitting quietly beside someone’s waiting, the way her grandmother once sat beside her on the pier — that is Eleni’s tarot.