Wild Cherry

When I think back to when we first met, the images are now vague, but I don’t recall her having wings back then. 
It was late 1992. The place: East London Buddhist Centre. 
I was running a 10 week Tai Chi course, and Cherry had been dragged along to the first session by her flatmate. 
The class was packed with new faces, eager to learn something not part of the usual buddhist program. 
And I was nervous. Would a buddhists know I was not a buddhist? Could they tell by my flippant tongue, my clothing, my disregard for spiritual disciplines? 

As I watched them all gather in the room for the first class, I glimpsed someone with wild hair and huge eyes hiding towards the back. She had a infectious smile and I secretly hoped, she would be one of those that stayed the course. 

A few weeks later I found myself sitting next to her at a party someone had invited us to. I saw in her eyes and the shape of her hands that evening, that she was a lost forest creature, not of the world I had encountered to date. Not a buddhist either, but an artist. Her voice arose above the party like a siren beckoning me to her studio. She spoke of enchanted paths and forest trails, and I found myself stepping into her world of contour and colour, texture and light, never to return to my drab existence of the concrete and tarmac of London streets.  

Together and yet apart 
Without thought nor plans we fell into each others arms, until, just a few weeks later, I admitted I was soon to leave. 
The sound of the forest faded, her smile dissolved, her world tumbled in on itself. I was due to leave the UK and study abroad for a year.  
I pleaded her to come and visit. She knew nothing of Spain. She had no interest in the place. When she travelled, it was to Africa - to India - to places with culture and history. What interest did she have of coastal tourism or acquiring a suntan?

Come and I will show you another world, I promised. 
She visited me in Seville - one of the most beautiful and romantic cities in Europe - 4 times that year, each time falling deeper in love with the colours and scents, the arabic architecture and jewish barrios, the allure of the orange blossom and the length of shadows.

She fell even deeper than I, so much so, that by July 1996, we sold everything we owned, piled our remaining possessions into a Peugeot 205, packed away a laptop, a portable scanner, a PCMCIA modem, a portable printer and we were ready to start work in Europe. We giggled at the thought of an adventure into the vast unknown landscapes of the country and planned to stay away from the UK for the next 12 months. 
We would not return for 20 years.

Beginnings
We had a crazy idea to create a guide book that could be dismantled into parts. It was madness, but it didn’t matter for it was the excuse we needed to play rather than work. She would employ her graphic design skills and I, my knowledge of the history and culture of the country I had acquired doing the degree course. 

We spent 3 joyous months in Catalunya before settling in Toledo where we began to write not just the guides, but also stories of living in the city (unpublished). But we found in that haunted city,  a ghostly darkness at night, and by day a conveyer belt of tourism that consumed the river bound town. We published the 2 short walking guides, in both English and Spanish but struggled to find outlets prepared to sell them. Beneath the surface, Tourism was tightly controlled by a few who were determined to keep at bay others trying to nudge their way in. After 2 years of fighting the mafia there, with Cherry fending off anti-semitism from the religious denominations that controlled much of activity in the city, we admitted defeat.

Fleeing
First we fled north, to a charming flat next to a river bank, under the shadow of a castle, and stayed until the cold winter descended. Cherrys wings retracted in the cold, so we headed to the warmth of the south, eventually settling in Laurie Lee’s Almunecar, where her wings re-emerged once we applied for an craft-stall in the night market on the sea front.

We both loved the trading activity, the buzz, the non-digital living - the assembly and decoration of the stall, the contact with customers, the simple act of creation and the lack of screens. We travelled to other summer markets and Xmas fairs to sell Papier-mâché plants, clocks made from stones, necklaces, ankle chains, bracelets and earrings that mostly she assembled and designed, long before the importation of cheap produce from other countries. But we only enjoyed that life for a short time. Cheap imports arrived on mass from abroad and we were undercut with imported versions we couldn’t compete with. 

We had adopted a wild blue-eyed samurai of a cat (Sophie) and then, while setting up in one market, a vet had brought alone a collection of abandoned puppies, and so we returned home that day with Yogi Bear - a mongrel brown short-legged creature with a pouch. It was with these furry ones, we decided to move further inland, away from the increasingly tourist dominated coastline, and into a house on a spur at the top of a valley. It had no electricity, no gas and no water, other than a small well 300metres down the hillside. 
But the house sat above the clouds and Cherry saw herself flying again the moment we found it.
In the that house, surrounded by nothing but nature parks, she began to paint again and her smile returned, bigger than ever.  

Above the Clouds
But in time, we found the place isolating, and detached from everything - being 20 minutes drive to the nearest neighbour and along a hairpin end vertiginous track cut into the side of a mountain. It was hard, the soil was hard - our carrot crop failed, our tomatoes dried up and the radishes refused to sprout. Even the countless olive trees struggled to fruit. Then of course there was the wild fires to contend with and trigger-happy hunters every Sunday. 

By 2005 we had begun to consider moving further inland. We circled the city of Granadain our van, searching for a sign as to where to go. As we dipped into each town, we stumbled across a place the guide books suggested “not worth stopping at”.  It sounded perfect. We headed directly there. 

City of Water
The town - Loja  - would be our home for the next 11 years. It was there that we found our hispanic identity. Surrounded by curious neighbours with warm hearts, Cherry blossomed. The town embraced (in its early days) culture and the arts. Her studio became an explosion of colour, imagination and experimentation. She exhibited many times in the town, drawing confidence and even the strength to teach Yoga for several years as part of the towns sports department. 

It was a town in which  - despite the heat and houses that melted towards each other under the summer sun - she skipped along inspired by the silhouette of the church spires, the surrounding forests, the river flowing through the middle and the high mountains on either side of the valley. 

For many years, we forged new friendships and links between communities, we organised street theatre, international cinema seasons, food fiestas, cultural excursions and exhibitions and performances. We even ran away to Tarifa one weekend, crossed the border into Gibralter and got married under a portrait of the Queen.  I swore that day, as part of the ceremony to protect her till death us do part. I remember that clearly now.  

Over time, yet more forces came into play and the ground beneath us began to move. The town shifted politically, culturally and the arts were de-funded. Without investment and subsidies, the working population began to move out to seek opportunities in bigger cities. Our work - now increasingly limited to teaching yoga and tai chi or book publishing - needed a legal framework that would not charge us more than we were earning - so we turned towards the the Uk, established a company and without realising it, began the process of detachment, 

A foot in two camps 
A procession of family deaths, followed by Brexit and then Covid uprooted us further until we found we could could only spend half our time in Spain and half in the UK. 

Mobile living though was nothing new to a woman whose roots were embedded in the expulsion of jews from Eastern Europe. She took to a nomadic lifestyle as though it was second nature. Of which it was. It was in her DNA, coursing through her Sephardic blood and so we embraced the change and the challenge, absorbing the creative juices that are so often released when travel forms an integral part of your path. 

For 2 years we skipped between countries, pausing and resting in Spain, while bouncing, like a pin-ball from one part of the UK to another as we sought back-to-back house sits each 3 month period, before returning to Spain. 

Cherry, inevitably, invented a portable studio, that could be packed away in the back of our fiat 500, squashed alongside our coffee machine, our clothes and shoes, and all the possessions we needed for stretches on the road. As we arrived to a new town, she eagerly unpacked her pencils and sketchbooks, inks and pens, scissors and glues in each new house. And in each place, she settled in, then drew, sketched, cut out and stuck, coached flailing creatives in need of guidance - and all the while producing works of art inspired by location after location.  

Until one day, she couldn’t. 

Not enough
In Sept 23, she was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. 

The world stopped turning. It was a stellar collision of extraordinary proportions. Everything crashed into itself: blood froze, the wind stopped, clouds turned their backs on us and even the air burnt our throats as we tried to articulate the end of everything.

And Cherry - mi media naranja - my spiritual companion, closed her eyes and her wings retracted. And as much as I held her as tightly as I could for 18 months, and whispered secret spells each night to ward off the evil that crept into her body, it proved not to be enough.

It had not been enough, my oath to protect her under that faded royal portrait.

It had not been enough, my special medicinal soups every evening for a year, my ginger and turmeric drinks.

It had not been enough, my nightly stories read to her sleeping furrowed brow.

I now know that my love alone was not enough. Nor the medicine, the treatment, the specialists, the drugs. Other forces were at play that would come for her. 

Yet, when they came, I somehow managed to walk with her to the end of her path, hand in hand. And there teetering on the edge,   her eyes opened for a fleeting second, I kissed her furrowed brow and she leapt. 

My tears followed her on that final journey, and for anyone that wishes to see where she went, look, she said, to the constellations each night, the tidal flows, the pattern of coffee clouds during a spring afternoon and in the wild untamed songs of the wind.  

Look she said, for when the seagulls fly at dusk, for as their wings reach out to ride the air currents and the final suns rays guide them home, there I'll be.