In the city or the country?

Do you want to live in the city or in the country?

Lately I have been living in the country, housesitting for one of my daughters who lives in Sta. Rosa on the way to Tagaytay. It is a highly civilized place, the number of homes growing by the day. Grocery stores and shopping malls are opening. Her area has a really small commercial center with a bank, a drugstore and a dance studio. I guess that tells you what we need to survive — a place to get our funds, another one for our medicines and shampoos and a place to dance our cares away.

You know I am in my 70s, have lived through a lot of history. Once we had a farm in Laguna.  We use to drive there on the old national highways before the expressways were built. It would take us about one-and-a-half hours to get to our Los Baños farm.  I remember passing through Sta. Rosa. Then it had many provincial dance halls with many dance girls that they called trumpo. No, that’s not as in Trump (Donald) in English. Translated it means a top, the toy that spins. Sta. Rosa was one of the hot places on the way to Los Banos and I remember very clearly a sign nailed on the stair post of a two-story wooden house saying, “Hindi po ito and bahay ng pam-pam.”  You translate. I won’t. I still think it’s funny and unforgettable. And all this land that are developments now used to be either sugar cane fields or forests then.

Greenfields was a forest at the foot of Mount Mailing until it recently became another Ayala subdivision. Now more and more people are moving into places that once were forests but now are posh subdivisions. These are the places I mean by country living. They are considered the suburbs now but there are things leftover from their forest days.

 When you live in the city, it is noisy all day — ambulance sirens, fire alarms, motorcycles, buses, karaoke all day and night, fireworks. In the country it is wonderfully quiet.  You wake up in the morning to the sounds of birds chirping, cawing, calling loudly to each other.  You want to see them but you can’t.  Most of them are hidden by the leaves of the trees.  But I have seen crows, bright yellow and black birds, whose names I don’t know, fat brown and white sparrows or mayas, big greyish brown birds, and tiny little greyish brown birds, who come to roost and gossip endlessly with each other at dusk before they all sleep under the leaves of a bamboo tree outside the study where I sit.  They quiet down when it’s dark and the next morning you see hundreds of bird droppings on the ground below.  Of course there’s a kingfisher that comes regularly because, my daughter thinks, it is attracted to the blue ribbon she has tied to the tall palm  inside her house.  It sits on a branch of a kalachuchi tree, scratches under its wings, then settles without moving.  I think it has fallen asleep as the boughs of the tree are swept by a gentle breeze.  But suddenly a gust of wind comes. The kingfisher is jolted awake, pecks under its wings again, soon settles into another nap only to be upset later by a stronger gust of wind.  He gets irritated and flies away.

 I live in a condo in San Juan, way up in the air. I see birds too. In the early mornings I hear the mayas chirping among the plants outside my bedroom. When I sit on my porch to write in my journal I see flocks of doves who live on the roof. I also have birds but they don’t sing or call out to each other. I have never heard the doves coo. Birds are generally quiet in the city. But in the city it’s easy enough to go out and do your shopping if you’re patient with the traffic. In the country I asked my driver to turn left and go to what looked like a mall that might sell appliances. You see, before I moved over to housesit, my steamer died. Since I live alone, buy cooked food and heat it for myself, I need a steamer.

The first store I went to had no steamer. Go across the street, the lady recommended, there’s another appliance store there. Oh ma’am, the lady at that store said, we don’t have what you’re looking for.  But if you go past Laguna Avenue, I am sure you will find it there. I went and sure enough I found it there.

 But once upon a time this entire area was a forest. Are there snakes here? I asked my grandson. Yes, he said. Mom saw one in the bamboo tree outside her study. It was big, he said.  So that’s it for me. I don’t like snakes. Once when I lived in Calamba and went walking every morning. I came upon a snake whose head was lost in the grass on one side of the road and whose tail was in the grass on the other side of the road.  I began to walk backward and ran when I thought it was safe. They have more lizards in this house and they have tuko, very scary, very ugly, if you are scared of lizards you jump out of your skin when you hear the tuko. I have not ventured beyond the locked screen door because the tuko sounds like he’s near the house.  One of the helpers says she remembers someone she used to work with found a tuko stuck to his headboard.  He summoned all his bodyguards to get rid of it. That’s funny, isn’t it?  Your bodyguards expect to protect you from other people not from big ugly lizards.

If you have a house with a pond you have bayawak or ghekkos I think they are called in English and immense bullfrogs. You have three kinds of frogs in your pond — bullfrogs that mate leaving yards and yards of eggs, tree frogs that sound like birds chirping at night but have the most horrifying tadpoles, and ordinary frogs that become hundreds of teeny weeny frogs that sit on your lilypad staring blankly at you.  I know. I used to have a pond and those teeny weeny frogs are the reason I once called my column “Lily Pad Lectures.”

 There is an invisible animal who lives inside the ceiling in a part of the house that’s above the front door. I don’t know what it is but it thumps at various times daily. I asked my daughter what it was. She shrugged her shoulders saying it’s an animal.  Well now the thumps are louder. I think it’s a giant rat doing the flamenco. That’s probably because I have so little to do I watched The Tale of Despereaux, a full-length cartoon that gives you the difference between rats and mice. I really enjoyed it.

 But I love it here when it rains, the sweet gentle sound of water dropping on leaves, murmuring, whispering, I can’t describe the sound, like someone you love dearly breathing gently in your ear.

 That’s all the news I can manage today.  So now may I ask — where do you want to live in the city or in the country? Me? I just want to go home.

* * *

Please text your comments to 0917-8155570