Light

SOMETHING about summer’s light stirs the sap.  

One morning, my feet uncharacteristically turned to the street leading away from our home. Kitkat, our feral dam, was chewing the kibble with her usual measured, contemplative air. A neighbor had risen earlier and cleared the street of dead leaves. 

What is it about a deserted street in the greyness of a summer’s dawn? I left behind our communicant cat, my broom, and canister of kibble. I left behind our home, a sleeping spouse, and dogs much affronted to be left out of the jaunt. 

I had in the backwoods of my mind my sons’ reminders to walk for wellness but I doubted if my feet were set on being dutiful the moment it swerved for streets unknown. 

Kitkat’s daughter Wiggy accompanied me for a few meters until she pounced away on her own exploration. The houses I passed had a closed-in shuttered look, with only dogs irked to be penned in cracking the eggshell-stillness of dawn, sharp and shrill in hectoring the intruder. 

I paused before a tree with kapok-like fruits hanging from its bare outspread branches. None of the wispy filaments were on the ground but I remembered the heavy, lumpy pillows I slept on as a child. 

Sometimes, a seed surfaced in the kapok fibers. At bedtime, I searched with my fingers until I found the seed outlined by the pillow cover and rubbed it like a worry bead. This was how I fell asleep, never finishing my prayers.

I reached a street sloping downhill, with a cement mixer making a gallant, though portly silhouette against the overgrowth and construction chaos. Remembering they were clad only in cotton, not chainmail, the legs chose prudence and turned for home. 

On the way back, I passed again some twine left on the street by men who whistled every afternoon for wind to send off their kites. The husband joined these long, intent discussions on whether a garbage bag is better than paper for kite-making, or if a bumble bee or a dragonfly soars higher.

Foraging for kitchen twine for a grand “tutubi na saranggola (dragonfly kite),” the husband suddenly remembered a childhood friend who taught him how to unfold the brown paper pouches used to hold pan de sal, cut off excess paper with one tug of a twine, and affix coco midrib filched from a broom onto the pan de sal wrapper with stale rice grains rubbed to a paste.

Keep the kite light so a breeze can send it off, remembered the naïve schoolboy, who had assembled Japanese paper, barbecue sticks, yarn, scissors, and glue.

Stooping for the twine to bring home, I saw that a third “string” turned out to be the old skin sloughed off by a foot-long snake. This sojourner shared my pickings: travel light.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 21, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Secret of life

BUTT-SMELLING was my rude introduction to Auntie Socks. Early one morning, Noki scooted off as I was sweeping leaves in the street. 

She reappeared, trailing behind a lady whose pinched face and stilted steps said she was not happy to have our aspin’s snout quizzing her behind.

I apologized, explaining that dogs picked up information by way of their noses: friend or foe, mate or rival? Interjected our neighbor, “And I thought your dog just wanted to eat me.”

By six o’clock in the morning, the aunties are roving in the village. Average age: 80 years. At 55 and with hair flecked with more pale strands than dark, I count myself as a junior auntie.

Having lost their house with help from her husband (“only help he gave I did not want”), Auntie Socks rotates among four children. Finding New York “too cold,” Metro Manila, “too warm,” and Sagay “too far,” Auntie Socks prefers Silang, where she walks daily to ease varicose pain.

In pink slippers and dotted melon socks, Auntie Socks sometimes joins Auntie Camias. A year ago, on my way to feed the feral mother of the puppies we adopted, Auntie Camias used a walker as aid in making a short circuit in front of their house. 

She has upgraded to a cane. When Auntie and her companion return from their walk, their hands are sometimes full of plump camias given by a neighbor.  Auntie Camias always chats with the mother and daughter cats accompanying me; they love her, too, specially the fish tidbits soured in camias broth she leaves out for them.

Inda is more “ima” (mother) than “nunu” (grandauntie) to her Kapampangan relations. The first friend I made, Inda gave up cigarettes after last year’s Taal ashfall.  My daily partner in sweeping and bagging dead leaves observed that dead people should be as easy to dispose of. If I reach Inda’s age, I hope to keep a sense of irony, even if I lose all my teeth.

Honorary auntie is Uncle Special Ingredient. Surviving a stroke four years ago, Uncle, 84, calls out, “tinapay” (bread), from the e-trike he drives past our street six days a week.

My favorites are his tinapay with malunggay and tinapay with ube. I asked him why he never announces that the latter has bits of salty cheese setting off the sweet ube. Uncle said the cheese is a “secret” between him and his “suki” (patrons).

Actually, our gang has two Auntie Socks. In 2016, when I first binged on Korean dramas (K-dramas), I wore socks to bed as it was very cold at dawn when I tiptoed to switch off the router. My sons said no socks could disguise the overnight “shenanigans” of someone old enough to know better than to fall for the “next episode” syndrome.

To be in our gang, life has to happen.

(mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 14, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Till K do us part

NOTHING like a pandemic to shake up the marital tree. 

During enhanced community quarantine (ECQ), the husband unexpectedly returned home for his forgotten pass. He rushed inside our home, only to stop abruptly and sniff the air.

What have you been up to? His slitted eyes already condemned me even before I could cover up my mistake.

The man I married has a nose that any K-9 species would envy. If anyone can smell illicit love in the air, that’s the husband. This department, though, skipped me in their recruitment.  

Did I fart? Married this long, we are intimate with each other’s odors. 

Did I eat kimchi directly from the jar again? Without taking my eyes off the husband as I’ve seen Indiana Jones freeze in a pit full of rattlers spitting with anger, I returned the lid and closed the jar.  Tightly. Grimly.

Marriage IS enhanced couple quarantine, without presidential extensions and absolutions. Close friends still wonder what the husband saw in me, or I in him, given our swerving passions. 

We managed to sleep in the same bed for 29 years because it is too narrow for us to bring baggage. I don’t sleep with books; he doesn’t bring in power tools. 

ECQ put our complacency to a test. Our half-a-duplex home became suddenly too small for personal space.

We step gingerly around the marital minefield of enforced togetherness. We appreciate the bubbles of domestic quiet and placidity, rewards of long-time companionship. We know, too, how bubbles work. 

The Great Puncture came with kimchi. Tolerant of the health benefits from this side dish of fermented vegetables, the husband bought a jar for a wife who eats anything she does not have to cook.

Love, even one that comes with a contract witnessed by God and family, has limits called the Chinese cabbage or the Korean radish. Or the cabbage AND radish.

Instigated by a third party—say, fish sauce or shrimp paste—an innocuous vegetable can engage with another plain green leafy creature to release a reek of unholy pungency.

To keep olfactory peace, I promised to finish the kimchi while keeping the lid always in place and sealing the bottle in a zipped bag.

And then the day our home smelled familiarly like a sewer. How did we reconcile the irreconcilable? 

Kimchi bombs pale to the time I chose our budget date on the strength of this restaurant’s wall-sized TV playing “Train to Busan” (our pork steaks were anorexic compared to the flaps of skin hanging from the zombies trying to nibble at Gong Yoo), and the unmentionable period I aspired to imitate the NoKor women collectively making kimchi in giant basins on “Crash Landing on You”.

In marriage, the poison becomes the glue. Or exchange the partner.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 8, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

House of women

I HAVE long been inducted as a furlol, acting as a "lola" or grandmother to grandchildren of different species.

Five days after giving birth, our “aspin (asong Pinoy)” Noki left her young to my watch to run, dig in the garden, and bark at startled passersby. 

The three puppies, veterans now at nursing and napping, have come to resemble fat spitting Cebuano chorizos rolling and snuffling on the kitchen floor. When they squeal, I leave my work even though I am certain I locked the door and double-checked to make sure that the other aspins and “puspins (pusang Pinoy)” do not slip in while Mother is enjoying her “me” time. 

Newborn kittens slip out soundlessly from their mothers, latching on then curling to sated sleep with preternatural composure. Kitkat, unblinking veteran of four litters and counting, reminds me of women lying in darkened, too hot rooms, forbidden to rise except to rinse in a medicinal bath of leaves as one heir after another slips out.

Puppies come with acoustics. They arrive with a wet sucking sound, as if blowing a raspberry at my attempts to be of use to their panting mother (labor started the night before and the puppies appear two to three hours apart). 

At less than a week, the puppies’ flipperlike limbs, so pink as to be translucent, wiggle and hint of dreams stuttering like old movie clips behind still furled eyelids. 

Minding the sleeping newborn of our rescued cats and dogs clenches something inside as bliss from watching these creatures dream is tempered by a clear-eyed realization of the world awaiting those eyes when these finally open.

A descending order of priority guides many Filipinos in choosing home companions: purebreds are valued more than abandoned strays; dogs, desired more than cats; and males, preferred over females. 

Not helping the female of the species are the fees charged by private veterinarians: spaying is twice more expensive than neutering, with the actual cost depending on the weight of the animal and presumably the amount of anesthesia to be used. 

In our household, the kitchen is the busiest as a revolving-door nursery. Two months after Kitkat and her four kittens moved out, first-time mother Noki moved in. Rem, Noki’s sibling, has yet to “show” after mating. Kitkat’s daughter, Wiggy, is safe inside the house for now, but spaying is looming as an option. 

One too many birthing to book and only one kitchen-cum-nursery. Fortunately, I dislike cooking.

While Noki took a break to just be a dog and dig up dirt, we checked her puppies. Cheers, I greeted her when she returned to take over the furlol: Your girls are hangry (hungry and angry). 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s February 28, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

On the ground

MISTAKING one jeepney for another, I once took a route that took the passengers past the old stud farm at the University of the Philippines (UP) in Diliman. 

Same trees, same abandoned air. The sight of what used to be the National Stud Farm created during the Marcos administration made me remember 2017, when a professor gave our class a choice to either write a paper on martial law or visit the “lumad” visitors hosted by the UP Diliman community at the old stud farm.

I chose convenience; I wrote the paper. I wondered what I could “teach” in the informal classes being held for the lumad youths, who joined their parents and other elders in the annual Lakbayan ng Pambansang Minorya.

“Lumad” is Bisayan for “of the earth,” a term chosen by 15 of more than 18 indigenous cultural communities (ICC) in Mindanao during the Cotobato Congress in June 1986. 

From grade school references in Social Studies, I thought of them as a generic collective, “cultural minorities”. Alienating and politically incorrect, the term is still apt; the “minorities” remain at the margins of power, deposed from lands, waters, and other tribal spaces inherited from ancestors effaced by a succession of colonizers. 

I know arguably more about the Dole and Del Monte products than the lumad displaced by their plantations: the B’laan of Tupi and Polomolok in South Cotobato, the Higaonon and the Talaandig in Bukidnon. The wars of colonization were replaced by other wars: corporate plunder by multinational companies, “modernization” and “development” financed by foreign loans, culture of impunity targeting dissidence, and community lockdowns to quell coronavirus disease.

Since 2012, the lumad, joined by other “minority” peoples, undertake the Lakbayan to focus on their plight and search for social justice. If the center will not go the peripheries, the marginalized will go to us. Are we listening?

Journalism is essential for our democracy. Writing for deadline, sound bites, and live streaming metrics can take us only to a point. The lumad is more complex than the “bakwit” (Bisayan for “evacuee”) and the IDPs (internally displaced persons) constructed by narratives of conflict and war.

These are not the only stories. We are not the only storytellers on the ground. As a people deprived of visibility and intelligibility, the lumad best tell their stories.

When I stayed away from the Lakbayan sojourners sheltering in a center Ferdinand Marcos created in 1965 to improve horse breeding and discourage the local elite from illegally importing horses for racing, I was blind to the conceit of my “teaching” the lumad.

In or out of classrooms, the only activity worth doing is learning.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s February 21, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”