Guardians

WE keep house in Silang for one male human, a sire (male dog that has fathered puppies), three dams (two Aspin [Asong Pinoy] mothers who gave birth to their first litter and a Puspin [Pusang Pinoy] on her sixth litter, we guess), a young cat, five female puppies, and four female kittens.

And the bitch: Me. 

After I recently grilled a prospective guardian, the husband described the experience: terrifying.

He was probably describing the third degree our friend, in making his request to adopt a puppy, did not expect to be subjected to. 

I probed with the sensitivity of a “mambabarang” sticking pins to a victim’s lookalike doll: as a child, did you care for a dog? Do you know puppies quickly outgrow cuteness and become dogs, eating, shitting, and peeing all day? If you are a plantito, do you know what happens to plants around dogs? How strong are you about picking up your butt and taking a dog for walks every day?

Or the husband may just have been muttering “terrifying” to himself: will she ever let go of those puppies/kittens?

Six enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) periods ago, our Luzon co-existence was unexceptional. We fought like cats and dogs at times but, generally, stayed within our private domains as civilized primates. Then we adopted an abandoned litter of four puppies and the idiom “fighting like cats and dogs” will never be revisited with the old naivete.

More than a year later, we have become what the husband refers to with a lot of heartfelt hope: a pet placement agency. Admittedly, we are running out of space and barricades to keep our extended family in reasonable quiet and non-aggression. Yet I insist we rehome by seeking families who will welcome the puppies and kittens and commit to them as family members for life. 

I am wary about the widespread bias that an Aspin makes a good guard dog after seeing too many chained, caged or left without food or water to discourage intruders while a family is away. Assisting as “mananabang (midwife)” during the birthing of our dams, the husband and I expect no less than the valuing of each life.

With her three puppies emerging after two-hour intervals, Noki’s process, from nesting to birthing, lasted for more than 24 hours. She refused food, water, and toilet breaks for nearly a day to nurse her girls. Rem was unsettled by the crowning of the first of the two puppies; she had to be fed by hand in between births. In the middle of giving birth, a bloodied Kitkat emerged in answer to the calls of the husband, upset that she did not show up for a meal.

So while we still have a roof left to share, the husband and I take rehoming slowly but surely. He, the optimist; I, the bitch. 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s April 25, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Hoho

"SAAN ka, Saang (where are you, Spider Shell)?"

When Rem found the noon heat too much, she dug for herself and her pups a trench under the bamboo and turned up a tiny brown bottle, bits of wrappers, and a single “Tahong (Mussel)” shell. 

Moving to Silang more than six years ago, the husband and I have grown used to living more than a thousand feet above sea level; our palates, not quite. 

Calling Opon our home for decades, we are skeptical about “fresh” seafood sourced from Batangas or other parts of Cavite like Bacoor or Imus, all a good drive away.

Eating is about connecting with the people who raise food for a living. Makeshift seafood stands line up beside the Cavitex, the Manila-Cavite Expressway also known as the Coastal Road. Along the coast of Bacoor are the bamboo homes on stilts of the families of sea farmers raising mussels and oysters.

Yet, we have never pulled to the side of the road to check out the trussed-up immobile crabs and seaweed-strewn piles of shellfish. Tito G., who knows his crabs, cautioned us about roadside crabs, which are “hoho” or “ampao,” meaning “no meat at all just air”.

Far from hoho are the “Kasag (Coral or Mask Crab)” crawling out of the seawater-filled basins of women, up at dawn in Cordova. The vendors scoop them into a “Caltex” can as fast as the “Kasag” can scrape away, sidewise, crabwise, in their doomed escape.

Late afternoons are for going to Saac, just as the fisherfolk unload sacks of “Saang (Spider Shell or Scorpion Conch)” and before buyers snap these up for restaurants and hotels. 

Dropped into water when it boils (not before as the animal will burrow in the shell whorls, reachable only for regret), the Saang is chewy and flavored by nothing more than its own brine and wisps of “sibuyas dahonan (spring onions)”. 

Post-prandial, the Saang shell decorates our garden with its dramatic apex and fearsomely flared outer lip. As a child, I preferred the Saang’s smaller version, the “Aninikad (Plicate or Samar Conch),” whose scimitar-shaped nail I picked out with a bent safety pin after dipping my fingers into the greenish-yellow soup, imagining I was diving.

Don’t play with your food, was a childhood reminder I rarely heard. I threw out the not quite empty shells in the garden, where our dogs sniffed, buried, and unburied them, still redolent of the unknown.

When Rem dug out the Tahong shell, she did not even spare it an exploratory sniff. Buried so long, its opalescent underside had faded to a milky opacity.  Yet, living a thousand feet above the sea, I can smell this shell and recreate, memory as puissant as fingers, much soaped and washed, will still smell of the sea the sea hours and lifetimes after.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s April 18, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Raising ampalaya

I NOTICED the bamboo trellis under fallen leaves that I was sweeping away. It lay discarded on a mound of trash and rusting pieces of roofing material on the sidewalk.

A year ago—specifically, during the first enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) imposed in Luzon from Mar. 17, 2020 to May 20, 2020---neighbor D. crisscrossed slats of bamboo into a lattice that soon supported the creeping vines of ampalaya. The rest of us in the village street planted on the sidewalk’s strip of soil fruit and vegetable seeds saved from our tables and kitchens.

In the ECQ summer of 2020, we reaped what we sowed: ampalaya, tomato, squash, pepper. I learned not to bag a fruit if, after inspecting its surface, I spot the telltale hole that means an insect first claimed it as “mine” and laid its eggs inside. I listened to the inner gardener in folks I previously saw only behind fences and inside cars before the ECQ forced us to look more closely at each other.

Yet, as the restrictions relaxed in mid-2020, we retreated behind our fences. Returning after all checkpoints were removed between Metro Manila and Cavite, a non-residing neighbor uprooted the weeds in their lot, including the vegetables on their side of the sidewalk. Our most experienced gardener, D. went back to landscaping ornamental gardens.

Placed under the ECQ again on Mar. 29, 2021, which was extended to Apr. 11, 2021, our street has not revived communal gardening. During the second Holy Week under lockdown, I learned to cook ampalaya with egg by consulting YouTube. The two specimens of ampalaya I sliced came all the way from “neighboring” Batangas.

Nurturing vegetables and spices from seed to table is child’s play; more complicated is collectively raising a garden for everyone and no one in particular. Beyond relishing the scanty and infrequent fruits from days of toil and more days of waiting is initiating the equally unfamiliar and fraught commitment to converse with the people we share spaces with.

A garden in one’s backyard answers a yearning for self-sufficiency; raising a garden with other families banks on our interdependency.

Local governments, in pushing for backyard gardening as “pantawid-gutom,” promote this as a remedial measure for families in need of crossing over from hunger to survival. 

Perhaps a communal garden should be elevated to being the most subversive “pantawid (bridging)” proof of life in a pandemic. Just as the ECQ is the “most stringent” level not entirely due to restrictions; it unmasks the false solidarity of neighborhoods, communities, even families. 

Rich or poor, we need each other to surpass this greatest challenge to civilization. 

Leny and the ampalaya (Photo by Juan Miguel Q. Tabada)

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s April 11, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Fish or bird

THE MOST difficult is not the making but the imagining. In the second imposition of the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) over Cavite, as with the rest of the so-called “NCR Plus bubble,” I am learning from kites.

“Tabanog” in my native Cebu is “saranggola” in Tagalog and “burarul” in Kapampangan. Our neighbor D., who hails from Pampanga, refers to the shape of the kite he makes in our tree-lined street during long, still afternoons.

As soon as the 5 a.m. curfew lifts, I go out to sweep leaf litter from the street and come upon pieces of what became “guryon,” a large kite named after the Spanish sparrow, or “sapi-sapi,” a kite with a tail. 

D. has made a “tutubi (dragonfly),” and put together two boxes connected by four split-bamboo poles he calls “box” but which I think of as “Star Wars”.

My favorites, though, are the small plain triangles that become lost to sight when airborne. Only the tug of the “lambo (twine)” confirms there is a “bolador (flying fish)” being reined in, tugging at will to defy the earth and fence with the wind.

Twine, bamboo splits. In my street-sweeping, I come upon leftovers from afternoons when D. assembled a kite, followed avidly by neighbors. 

The ECQ prohibits this grouping now but no protocol can prohibit grown men from remembering the summers when leftover rice rolled into a gum turned the brown paper bag containing pan de sal into a bee or eagle that responds to the slightest flick of one’s wrist. 

Kite-maker and his retinue live for one thing: “tugpo”. In Cebuano, this is to fling a kite so it clings to the tail of a passing breeze and perchance sails on the wind. In Hiligaynon, “tugpo” is the breeze itself, released by the mountains and escaping to the sea.

At high noon, I hardly glance outside the window when the wind pats my damp face, when running feet clatter like dry leaves blown helter-skelter on the street, when men briefly turned boys chatter like sparrows. Without witnessing, I can imagine another “tugpo”.

After getting once too often splinters under my nails as a child, I gingerly put aside the “lipak” I find in my sweeping. Going by feel, the kite-maker whittles each slat of bamboo to just the right thickness to make the kite flex like the seemingly boneless coils of a serpent. 

As with the eponymous creatures they borrow their shapes from, kites are endangered by high-rises and power lines, the march of urbanization and the retreat of memory. 

One dawn, I came upon the sketch D. made with chalk on the pavement. After a day, all that remained of his imagined “burarul” was a fanned-out tail. 

Fish or sparrow?  From its perch beyond my reach, the kite says: be.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s April 4, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Muse

THE MOTH I mistook at first for a dead leaf or a brown stain on the wall. The kitten who trails me like a shadow pounced and flipped it. The brown wings fluttered on the kitchen floor before I scooped and placed the moth on the water dispenser.

Peering to check if its wings had not been ripped, I was diverted by the moth’s antennae.  In Cebu, the white wall in the garden is a magnet for moths of varied sizes and shapes. Yet, I had never seen until that day antennae as lush and feathery as the ones on the moth that narrowly escaped being toyed to bits.

Sweeping the air with majesty, these projectiles could be coveted by a drag queen or a teen fixated on eyelash extensions. I thought these antennae suited the more elaborate Lepidoptera cousins, the butterflies, but online sources pointed out that a moth flying at night needs these antennae more to make minute but crucial adjustments mid-air to evade obstructions or predators.

The flamboyance of the antennae creates more surfaces for sensors that make the moth more sensitive to smell than a butterfly.  Relying on the wind-borne information processed by the mechanosensors, a moth can smell and locate food or mate even more than seven miles away.

I wondered about our journeys, the confluence that brought a moth, a kitten, and a human in a kitchen being hosed down and cleaned of dog litter. The kitten has all the impetuosity of the five-months-young, pulled invisibly by curiosity and appetite. Already forgetting the moth, she was stalking more accessible prey, the dripping hose head.

The moth had not moved from the water container. It was probably recovering its breath as I was, caught in the eddies of house cleaning, clearing, cooking, washing up, sorting ad nauseam. 

Chores have the undemanding predictability of the quotidian. If I break routine, I brace against and resist the erosion of a formless, immovable monolith I attempt without any trace of irony to shove aside daily to do the work that matters. 

Autocratic but familiar, domesticity beguiles and smothers, delaying the chaos that begins when I sit in front of a screen or open a notebook.  A spanking spotless kitchen, matching pairs of socks: the harbor recedes the farther I strike away to put together a sentence or, by some miracle, paragraphs.

At the turn of the century, the few women who wrote did so for family and friends. Women authors were not published until newspapers, seeing a new market, opened a news hole for short essays. 

Immobile, the moth only puts forth its antennae to argue against historical elision: if you fly blind, trust in yourself, disorder and all.  Tell your stories; let the stories tell you. And fly. 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

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