Loly - The Greatest Neighbour
It’s hard to know exactly how to describe Loly.
From the day I met her when she introduced me to lemongrass tea with her own home-grown lemongrass while I Facetimed her daughter, in an encounter which ended with her wifi password, a promise that I’d water her flowers, and a litter tray and food for Not-My-Cat, she’s been the Spanish mother I never knew I needed.
Working in a hotel and with great English, she refuses to use it with me because she says (rightly so) that my Spanish needs to improve. Every conversation has her patiently and calmly teaching me new things and never laughing at me too much when I stumble over words.
She’s my lifeline to the Gomeran community - she knows absolutely everybody, and she’s the kind of person that everybody will help if she needs something because she goes out of her way to do the same for others.
I felt like a whole blog post needed dedicating to her, and I decided to write a list of possibly my favourite Loly moments.
- coming round with flowers and planting them in my garden
- Taking me to the “big city” (San Sebastian) 40 minutes away to help me navigate the furniture shops, and insisting on taking a photo of me on a bed for me to send my mother
- spending endless hours on the phone to the electricity company trying to sort the damn electricity out
- Inviting me for coffee with her mother and husband and providing more food than an army could eat (all of it absolutely amazing too)
- HINGES. Seeing some hinges on a cupboard in the kitchen. Asking if I was getting rid of the cupboard. I was, so I said yes. However my Spanish wasn’t good enough to say “yes, but not for a few weeks or so” so I didn’t say it. She assumed the cupboard was going almost immediately so took out a screwdriver and took the hinges, as she needed them for one of her cupboards and couldn’t buy them. We had wonky kitchen cupboards for a month, but I laughed every time I saw them
- Texting me over Christmas, after having gone to look around my house at the building work while I was in England, saying, “the new work is very good. The old kitchen and bathroom are very ugly.” (Which is true, they absolutely are.)
- Recently, saying, “when you were first here, your Spanish was very terrible. Now a little better.”
- Thinking nothing of walking up 8,000,000 steps (her mother’s house is above mine) to lend me a ladder when I started painting before realising that both I and my ladder were very short.
This list could go on. Safe to say, though, she has been an utter angel and I don’t know how I’d have got through the time here without her.
She has a knack for turning up just when she’s most needed - I was sitting in the middle of my living room after Christmas, surrounded by suitcases and crying because I’d started to unpack before realising I had absolutely no storage space, and therefore nowhere to unpack anything to and wondering why the hell I’d moved to a falling down house on a small island and hadn’t even thought to order some shelves.
While I’m in the middle of this pity party, I hear, “Felicity, Felicity!” and in walks Loly, who takes one look at me and the suitcases and says, “Ok. Let’s do this together.”
For me she epitomises why I love La Gomera so much. In Playa Santiago there’s such a community, and coming from Manchester I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. It’s a place where people genuinely look out for one another, helping where they can and stepping in if somebody has a problem. It’s taken a while to get used to the fact that if you sneeze at one end of the village, somebody at the other end will be asking where you caught the flu by the time you’ve walked over there, but even with that strangeness, it’s simply incredible.
I’m genuinely delighted every time I see Loly, and honoured beyond belief that I’ve been invited into her family home. She’s an unstoppable force of nature - once she’s decided something will happen, it will - yet one of the kindest, most selfless people I’ve ever met. And to me, she sums up why I’ve completely fallen in love with this island.