I learned today that the small house where my brothers and I spent our early years was finally torn down. I suppose it was about time — it was already a very old house, even before my family moved in — and it stood in a small community, in a small district, in a small town.
The house of my memory was the first shelter I ever knew, the first address to which I moved after leaving the hospital where I was birthed — it was where I had my first home-coming, in a way. It was witness to the first, in a long line, of my mother’s sleepless nights, when bedding down was accompanied by cloth diapers and blankets and pins and towels and wraps. Yet to this day, my mother counts herself lucky in that she breast fed all of her children and, thus, never needed to rest within reach of a baby bottle.
The house of my memory was where I first took a tumble, and where I first learned to walk and eventually — run. Naturally, running led to falling — again…and again. I still fall to this day, but the tumbles I am prone to now have nothing to do with running. The house saw me through the trappings of my first birthday party, my first Christmas get-together and my first New Year’s Eve.
I remember the field just outside the house of my memory. It served as the first playground for my brothers and me, as well as for the other children of that little town. It was where I learned to play the games of my childhood — pico (hopscotch), taguan (hide and seek), bahay-bahayan (play house), dyakstones (jackstones, the letter ‘j’ was not, at that time, part of the Filipino alphabet), patintero (a sort of organized game of group tag) and Chinese garter (which involved jumping over a stretched string that was held higher at every turn.)
The field was surrounded by aratiles (Jamican cherry) trees. Their fruits resembled rubies when they ripened, and the girls would smear the juices on their lips because it made them look like they were wearing lipstick. The boys, in turn, would capture and harness the huge spiders whose webs dangled from the branches, for ‘spider-fights.’ I am sure that more than a few of those same boys graduated to breeding fighting cocks in later life. My brothers and I headed off for that expanse of youthful freedom right after breakfast. We spent the better part of the day playing under a sun that was kinder back then, and went home grudgingly — it was almost a betrayal to leave when there was still a tiny bit of sunlight left.
Neighbors knew each other in our little community, the ‘hometown’ of my memory. It was not a wealthy town, far from it, but everyone was willing to share what they had. And they shared more than the material — they shared in the joy and good fortune that occasionally came, and they shared in the pain and misery, which was doled out more often by fate and the ‘bad spirits’ that were ever present, but hinted of only in whispers.
Nothing is left now of that small town, nor the field of my youth. They fell prey to ever changing zoning rules and ‘appropriation laws’ penned by a group of very smart government officials whose names were never mentioned and whose faces we never saw. And today the house that I remember no longer stands. It was old and small, but my memories of it will forever be renewed…and they will always be grand.
