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Where did my summer go?

There was a time when summer was all about lingering, relaxing, and just being. Back then, I could just daydream and read all I wanted, take siestas and suck orange-flavored Twin Popsies while watching show after show on HBO and that would be all good. There would be no tinge of guilt that I wasn’t being “productive enough,” whatever that meant to me then.

Summer was a template I fit my life snugly into — when the weather started to heat up, yes, things just had to slow down. Still in my school years then, I invariably knew June would be busy enough. I deserved the time off. Summer was all mine, to enjoy anyway I wanted, even if it meant guiltlessly floating through the day.

Very soon, the wet June weather will usher in luxuriously long evenings. Soon it will be time for hot soup and hot chocolate, close-toed shoes and umbrellas. My books and bowls of ice cream will still be there but my summer, this summer especially that just rocketed by, will have faded away into a blur. Where did it all go?

Like a stack of loosely bound pages, I can lift one little snippet after another of many summers past at will. Those were bright and simple days, they were, and the remembrance of them all still colors my feelings to this day.

My summers know that I loved building makeshift houses. Together with our playmates Dayday and Boyboy (siblings, their real names are actually Ginaly and Jeffrey), my sister and I would troop to our backyard where Daddy had built a house for them. Their father, Manoy Delfin, was one of, if not our favorite, drivers and his wife, Manang Virgie, was perpetually smiling and happy and made the best tablea from scratch. We would ask the panday for scraps of bamboo and plywood; the former we would use as posts, the latter as walls. It would be a small house but not so small that we could not stand and move inside it, two at a time. We would work on it until night fell, carefully hammering and securing spaces with nails Boyboy would find littered in the shop across the house on Bonifacio St. where the panday worked.

Mommy and our yayas were very generous in allowing us to use bundles of old sheets and skirts in pretty prints to dress and doll up our “house.” We would then play “cooking-cooking,” coloring water with red and deep pink bougainvillea flowers and pretending it was wine. We would fearlessly suck the nectar from santan flowers and eat mansanitas when we were too tired from using them as bala for our handmade tirador. It was also the time when Madonna and punk rock was big, so Boyboy would source scraps of black leatherette from his friend down the street who owned a machine and upholstery shop and together we would make wide wristbands studded with metal odds and ends from the hardware shop. We would then glop some gel on our hair,   styling