Remembering rainy afternoons in our ancestral house in Tanza.
There was that sewing machine by the wooden jalousie window with the right amount of light and fresh air seeping through and a good view of the green and the wilds.
I was on Indian squat in the middle top part of our long dark wood dining table.
She was doing one of her many masterpieces --- a big, chunky quilted comforter. With which after the final stitches I always loved to squeeze my toddler self in between them. T'was like getting drowned in a sea of patchworks.
Always a pensive listener. I adored all her stories about the Japanese Occupation, Philippine folklore and her personal struggles and successes in getting her college education, a rare feat for an Asian woman in the mid 1900s.
I was like 4 and wearing sunny yellow dress that she actually put together.
We chatted and laughed the day away. Lola and Ebey.
It felt so real in this room ---the scent of the "after rain", the imagery of tall wild grasses from the vacant lot just beside ours, the muddy soil, the sound of noisy, happy Kabitenyo frogs. It gives you such immense and unexplainable joy when all of sudden, out of nowhere, you get hit by memories like this, and like feeling every part of it so genuinely, knowing in your heart it was something that already passed, but the very thought of it, frame by frame, was truly lovely. No amount of words can describe that feeling. I just felt it and it felt so good.
I was actually with my dentist for another round of dental work, busy tinkering with my CPs, watching Stallone's Cliffhanger (a 1993 film, and seeing Michael Rooker, young and nice, was refreshing), and waiting for my blood pressure to go down to a normal level, (my dentist fed me bananas, arrgghhh plus or minus 10, damn, the trick did not work).
I was a few weeks short of my 46th summer.
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| sunshine, fresh morning dew and clothesline parang alaala ng kabataan ko sa Tanza |
