Invasion

AND one day, I could not find even one puppy in the garden. I wondered if all four rascals had somehow slipped through the gate when I heard faint barking from the other unit in the duplex.

Our next-door neighbor works overseas. We have seen her once when she briefly returned for a relative’s wedding. The house is permanently locked but the garden has grown unchecked.

Except for other neighbors sometimes helping themselves to the lemoncito and papaya the owner invites everyone to pick, only cats disappear into the disarray, perhaps hunting for birds’ and mice nests.

Until the K-pups discovered the other garden. The rainwater drain between our property and our neighbor’s leaves enough space in the “kamuning” bushes we planted as border between the properties for a seven inch-high creature to saunter through.

In their little savage hearts, there is no contest between our garden and the other place, so wild, shocking, sublime for mayhem and monkey business.

Examining the trophies of tangled-up roots and chewed-up twigs they bring back to our side, I am awed by the ease with which the K-pups easily pass in and out of these two spaces: the ordered, predictable, and humdrum world we imagine as a garden, and the insane, unbounded, and unpredictable Eden the puppies freely convert into what they want it to be at the moment.

Weeks of lockdown have made me realize how much of what constitutes my life is non-essential. Shedding these off—the material, the intangible—has not changed me.

The more difficult task is to invade spaces not imagined. What I cannot imagine, I cannot explore.

The mark of civilization is after all closed eyes, the ability to not just walk in the dark with eyes closed but to have the aptitude to convert the dark into the black-and-white patterns of the unknown and the known governing the way we divine and interpret our life.

In our myths, heroes and heroines journey to bring back the same fruit from the quest: a mystery reduced to a news story. Why should we not invert the happy ending: at the end of the mystery is even a greater one? Then the heroine can go off for more adventures. No retirement; no fading away.

What philosophers think of as the gaze are hoods, blinders, masks that shutter our eyes.

I suspect the K-pups suffer from no such malady. That curiosity, blessed savagery coalesce the known and the unknown into just one quality: the knowable. While rude appetites mark one territory as habitat and food and the other, as playground, their imaginations never fail as their eyes, nose, ears, paws.

Dogs do not divine, unlike humans. One lives; the other rehearses.



Limen. Under the kamuning, Silang, Cavite, 25 April 2020




(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s April 26, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

K

BEDTIMES are best. At midday, all four puppies and three cats are sleeping in the outdoor kitchen. For the first time in 24 hours, our home is sane.

Though the husband made a shed for the K-zoo, this tiny kitchen is the paws-down favorite for R&R. Cool tiles, shade, and access from the garden must be the attractions in these hot times, with summer, coronavirus disease (Covid-19), and enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) showing no let-up.

A zoo, a godson calls the K-company. K stands for “kinit-an (abandoned),” with the cats walking in from unknown streets and a basin of puppies waiting to be lifted off the street.

K also stands for “kauban (companion),” which I prefer over “pet”. The latter means affection bestowed on the other, a backhanded way of social distancing.

Traced to the Old French “compaignon”— meaning “one who breaks bread with another”—a kauban involves an exchange of choices: to approach, to adjust, to stay perhaps.

Kitkat, purring louder than seemingly possible from such a small frame, appeared while I was washing plates. Feral veterans often slip in when there is no human around. Kitkat wanted to feed but she did not want to steal. After a few more meals, she returned with two kittens, then with her tomcat of the moment.

When Kitkat is in heat, several toms hang around. Perhaps misnamed, Big Tom is not a Romeo or a Kitkat groupie. He is an old gentleman with a luxuriant but bedraggled marmalade coat and a touching weakness for strokes and chin-rubs.

A slim princeling, Tigr, from Kitkat’s first kindle, tolerates Big Tom but keeps his distance from the K-pups. Cats greet each other by touching and sniffing noses. No such delicacy for the savage K-pups, who chomp on tails and sniff butts, imperial or not.

Unexpectedly, it is Big Tom who submits, even grudgingly, to the puppies’ eternally optimistic view that even for those who are locked down and forced to live together against their will, the sum of what we have in common is greater than the difference remaining from our idiosyncrasies and divergences.

Midday finds Tigr napping on the highest shelf, hidden except for pink paw pads hanging over the edge. Heavy with her latest kindle, Kitkat looks down from the counter on the barbarians sprawled on the floor.

Napping in the middle of this circle of yipyipping puppy dreams and hedonistic limb-stretching is Big Tom. The indignity of being assaulted by a butt-sniffing juvenile or the substitution of his tail for a chewtoy merits only the lazy swatting of a paw minus drawn claws.

In the age of incivility, Buddha is a patriarch sleeping with the enemy.



Siesta. Noki and Big Tom, Silang, 18 April 2020




(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s April 19, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Dog days

WHAT is life like when you are about five inches high and two weeks old?

A day before Luzon was placed on an enhanced community quarantine (ECQ), we adopted four puppies. Their mother gave birth to them outside an abandoned house on a nearby street in the village.

The puppies were first kept inside car tires left outside the house and then moved to another house, also empty across the lot, whenever neighbors complained about the puppies’ keening.

After being moved from one spot to another to appease complaints, the four ended up on our street in a borrowed blue basin. Afraid those squirming dumplings would wander and fall inside an open sewer, the husband and I took them in.

I coaxed their mother to follow but, wary of humans, she only ate the food I brought. Since one of the cats we adopted is due to give birth, I didn’t try very hard to bring over the mother dog, who is fed by neighbors on that street.

Remembering the first week when the husband fed the pups milk with a medicine dropper, I find their swarming attention—barks, nips, scratches, licks—when I bring out their saucers of milk and puppy food in the morning a confirmation of how life adjusts during quarantine.

Supermarkets remain open but hardware stores and veterinarians’ clinics are closed. The husband turned carpenter to upcycle planks into a gate to prevent the pups from wandering off to the street, as well as a shed that they use less for sleeping than for tussling and skirmishing like little savages.

Living with four aspin (asong Pinoy) and three puspin (pusang Pinoy), physical distancing is only observed by the cats, streetwise and distrustful of animals that will eventually grow bigger and brawnier.

At first, the K-pups (“kinit-an” or abandoned) were distinguished by their tail or lack of it. Noki (no “ikog (tail)”) takes after her mother in this aspect. The runt of the litter, Rem (also the sleepiest), has a corkscrew one. Trail, alpha in size and trail-blazing in growth milestones, has the longest tail, followed by Play, the lone male and also the hungriest.

From playing to eating and sleeping, the K-pups move as a litter. Their personalities stand out during their least favorite activities: taking a bath and delousing. Without recourse to a vet, I handpick each dog’s fleas, souvenirs of those first weeks when they slept in the open.

Each pup resorts to different tricks to deal with being sequestered and forced to stay still. True to her name, Rem becomes Zen. Play hangs his head over the edge while my fingers comb his thick fur for parasites. Noki and Trail never surrender until they leap away to freedom.

These, so far, are our dog days in quarantine.


Full house. Silang, 16 March 2020



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s 12 April 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Obsession

SO this is passion. I wake when the sun is just a wash of red diluting the purple veiling the horizon. I wake early not to make love but to make war.

The first morning I brought three to ruin. The day after, five. In this rude awakening, the enemy appears long before the rains return to transform the garden into a wet and moist arena.

Fortunately, I am making the reacquaintance of an appetite I know too well. The enemy steals in under cover of darkness and disappears before the dew evaporates. Woe to the gardener who oversleeps and is caught unaware.

To catch a garden snail, I cannot be a snail myself.

My father, a World War II veteran, reserved his deepest scorn for a pest he called a “Japanese snail,” insidious and treacherous. Yet biologists show that this garden invader cannot be blamed on the wartime architect of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The common garden snail, “Cornu aspersum,” originated from Europe. According to the Invasive Species Compendium of the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International, many countries, including the Philippines, introduced snails to be cultured as food or accidentally brought them in with imported plants and vegetables, as the Spaniards did in their colonies in the sixteenth century.

I don’t need much help to create a mess.

A “snail’s crawl” is a hyperbole of ridicule. Frustrated over the trail of ruin left among plants painstakingly raised from seed and transplanted as seedlings into the ground, I have learned never to underestimate an enemy, even one that moves at a speed of 0.048 km/h.

Using its single “foot” of muscle to slide on the trail of mucus it secretes, snails can surmount any surface. Escaping my notice, snails congregated at the crown of a papaya plant that towered over our second floor. After the papaya withered and died, only the dark crown of brown- and black-banded shells remained as evidence of the remorselessness of appetite.

Regrets, like shortcomings, creep in unannounced and unwelcome.

Despite cartoonish depictions, the garden snail is a worthy opponent. It makes war against predators by making love. A true hermaphrodite, a garden snail is both male and female, with both partners during mating ejaculating and receiving sperms in large numbers and depositing an average of 100 eggs into a nest or about 500 eggs a year.

While I blame others, my problems multiply.

Before the noise of the world intrudes, waking early to handpick and crush garden snails is not Lilliputian when ranged against other struggles. As with other obsessions, the object becomes more and more to become the inverse twin of the obsessed.



Day after. Entering third week of enhanced community quarantine, Silang 04 April 2020




(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s April 5, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”