Of memories past.

'Yes, it was very good and glad you think so too.' This is a conversation I had with an old lover- I was 25 and he was 50, it was thirty years ago and our romance lasted for years. I had heard he was suffering with cancer and we renewed our contact. When I look back at all those years gone by and the way my life has turned out, I recall that he was the one lover who mattered a great deal. He taught me a lot about nature and about the excess of too much rum and sex. At his weekend forest home he had fashioned an open-air shower with a pipe from a nearby stream which poured cold water over you. Mountain crabs would nibble at your toes as you stood in this makeshift 'bathroom'. A chemical toilet which I absolutely loathed, was all we had. In the mornings I would watch in awe as a flock of oropendulas would descend onto a mango tree and demolish the fruit in seconds, in a noisy, manic gaggle. I remember my sister and a Canadian friend came to visit us on our weekend hideaway and marvelled at the 'wildness' of it all. We took them hunting for crabs after the rain flushed them out and we laughed and were happy. How life has led us all in very different directions and how we learned to live in the moment because after that there was nothing left. Thank you, G.

Photo copyright SvD.