CEBU, Philippines — When everyone runs inside every time it rains, Flora opens her umbrella and goes under the heavy shower. “Flora, aren’t you afraid you might catch a cold?” Ate Zee asks her.
“Nope. I make sure to wear warm clothes and put a cap on before I go out with my umbrella,” Flora says with a smile.
One afternoon, Flora was asked to buy bread. It was just drizzling as she was going out, but it poured when she got to the bakery. She didn’t have an umbrella with her.
Their mother, Mrs. Ouano, asked Ate Zee to go and fetch her younger sister with a jacket and an extra umbrella. “Okay, Ma. I’ll go when I finish answering this module,” Ate Zee said.
“You have to go now, Zee. The rain is getting heavier. Your sister must be feeling cold now!” their mother insisted.
Unexpectedly, Flora was not in the bakery when Ate Zee arrived.
“There was a lady who came and talked to her. They chatted happily before they left,” the security guard at the bakery told Ate Zee. She started to panic. Where could Flora be? Why did she talk to a stranger? Why did she go with her? So many questions were running in her head while she looked for Flora around the neighborhood. No one had seen her sister.
It was getting dark. She ran home to tell her mother. Mrs. Ouano asked her where she had been and what took her so long. Ate Zee was confused. “Ma, Flora was…,” she started to say, but from the corner of her eye, she saw Flora sitting at the dining table.
“Flora! Where were you? Why did you leave with a stranger? I was so worried!” Ate Zee cried.
“What are you talking about? She arrived just few minutes after you left,” Mrs. Ouano asked.
“It was raining. How did she get home so dry? And she’d been told not to talk to strangers!” Ate Zee didn’t understand.
“When you left, I stood outside to wait for both of you and saw Flora walking towards the gate alone. It wasn’t raining anymore. She said she didn’t see you on the way here. We were worried about you instead,” Mrs. Ouano explained.
Before they went to bed that night, Ate Zee confronted Flora. “The security guard said you left with a lady. Who was that?”
Flora smiled and answered, “Oh, that was Tita Allyson. She’s my friend. She brought me home, that’s why I didn’t get wet.”
“But Mama said you were alone when you came home,” Ate Zee continued to ask.
“She’s a rain fairy, so she can be invisible if she doesn’t want anyone else to see her.”
Ate Zee’s jaw dropped. She was speechless to hear Flora’s answer.