Life has become finally very simple. The children are grown, flown, on their own. They don’t need a mother anymore and I have found that having fish instead of children is so much easier. They are not as much fun, not witty at all and certainly, not cuddly, but they’re not quarrelsome and they make amusing company. I’m always amazed that they respond to my voice. They hear me on the bridge and out they come swimming around waiting to be fed. I throw them pieces of bread and they make smacking noises, my greedy fat carp with bad table manners, while the mollies and the swordtails cluster around the bread chunks in changing patterns, like glass chips in a kaleidoscope. How lovely to be able to do this whenever I feel like.
I left the corporate workforce, just like that, like a juggler who just refused to catch one more ball, just refused to raise the tired hands, just let the balls fall and roll away. I walked away without a backward glance, really. You do something for 30 years, you’re supposed to miss it. Once in a while I think about it, but I’m not sure I miss it so much as I need to figure it out, need to know what that was all about. Like I told one of my friends, "Remember Scarlet O’Hara? ‘Tomorrow, I’ll think about it tomorrow…’ Now after 30 years, my tomorrows are asking to be unraveled, understood, honored before I file them away or before they file me away."
That’s what I do between consultancies, teaching, reading, creating new classes, stringing beads, planting flowers, and keeping house. I don’t know if I have really become more patient. I think I have learned to flow, to allow the fullness of time to carry me in its swells rather than insist that something happen right now. I accept now that the standards and the pace of country living are different from city living so I have tried to keep the best of both worlds. I tried to open a local bank account and faced the humiliation of being turned down. Since then I decided to just keep my present bank where people treat me well. It’s only an hour away and I can plan to go when I’m in Makati. If I run out of cash, I know where the local ATMs are. I don’t have to deal with the local folk who take one look at me and decide that I live in Makati.
As much as I can I rely on technology that bypasses people – my cell phone instead of my landlines; e-mail. With these in place I find I can live quite well with the quaint offerings of a small town. I’ve learned that if you are willing to wait, you can actually get everything you want. I remember when I would look out of my window at dust and barbed wire. "It looks like a gulag out there," I complained to my contractor. Even my landscaper, Adjie Lizares, could not reassure me that eventually there would be a garden out there. Now after two years my neighbors admire the lush bougainvillea that grows and flourishes through my gracious neglect. Bougainvilleas don’t like to be cared for. They like to be forgotten, parched, then blessed with a little occasional rain. Everything in my garden is blooming and babying. The palms are having babies. The bamboo tree is blooming. I never knew bamboo trees bloomed. My chestnut trees podded and popped.
Looking at the feature on my house I thought of the other blessings that come with the territory. Photographs don’t allow you to hear the sound of the wind rising, rushing, swishing through the leaves, rattling glass panes even at the height of summer. You don’t hear the wind dying down as quickly as it rose. It hides, dies maybe, and for a few hours in the afternoon and very late at night everything is still, not a creature stirs, not even the bayawak or monitor lizards that annoy me so much. They jump into my pond and scare my fish half to death.
When the wind is high, you smell nature in all her richness. The scent of dried leaves baking in the sun is not the same as the smell of dried leaves soaking in the rain. Aromatherapy doesn’t remotely compare to the real thing. There is something smoky about the smell of dried leaves baking in the sun. It mingles interestingly with the cloying sweetness of the nim tree’s blooms. It is summer and already those big trees are in fruit. "Gemelina," Anna, my companion who knows everything, tells me. I don’t know. I only know big trees with sprays of yellow and brown flowers that look like orchids, that turn into green smooth inedible fruit that ripen on the tree then turning gold fall to the ground. They crack open, are crushed underfoot by the village walkers and joggers. They smell of wild figs and add a spicy note to the air that intensifies at night. This is our local perfume. I inhale it deeply as I stand near my bed contemplating that beautiful sky painted by Van Gogh. Sometimes there is a slight piggery topnote, clear enough to detect, but far enough not to ruin everything. "No respiratory diseases in the communities that surround our village," our resident doctor says. "Only malnutrition because they are poor."
The photos could not make you hear the silence. You wake up in the deep of night to silence as deep. These nights you hear a carnival barker and terrible music far away. "Perya (country fair)," Anna says, "early this year. May is fiesta season." But it doesn’t bother me as much as the techno thump played at the poolside of The Rockwell Club last Sunday. I tried so hard to get the staff to turn off their loud techno music obviously played for their enjoyment and not the guests’. Still, the minute I got up to go to the restroom for a while, the music came back on full blast. Silence, soft soothing music, those are marks of gentility. Loud techno thump does not belong to an elite club but there it was and no one was supervising, worse, no one was responding to the request for more soothing music. I could not wait to return to my country home where birdsong and then silence waited to soothe and embrace me.
Sometimes life gets me down. Sometimes solitude turns to loneliness. I pace up and down my lovely house and think – in the end, this is all I have. "It’s plenty," says my best friend. He is right. So thank you for your e-mailed compliments on my home. Thank you for appreciating all I have.