Childhood Treasures

The feeling is familiar.

I felt this way when as a teen I learned from my father that electricity was coming to Hamoraon, our village by the sea.  The path of the posts and wires would trace the coastline  and that coconut trees along the way would be cut and uprooted.  For a long time I cried in my heart because of this intrusion of the outside world into my childhood paradise.

Then not too long ago the same familiar feeling came back when I learned that a business group was buying the land in Barrio Hamoraon by the big 'sabang'  closest to the 'punta' where they planned to construct a power plant.  I was angry, I was sad,  I had sleepless  nights.  It would mean a wasteful destruction of a most beautiful coast of white pebbles and clear blue waters not to mention a threat to the health of the barrio folk. The governor stopped it, however, but he lost in the last elections.  It is now a 'wait and see' if the plan pushes through.

Now I am having this deep, sinking feeling again.  A mixture of sadness, anger, frustration.  Another cradle of my childhood memories is being threatened.  And since I am half a world away, I don't even know if, as I am writing now,  it is already slowly being destroyed. 

The house has always been a thing of beauty, a one of a kind style in a neighborhood once quiet and peaceful.  Every passerby would admire the chalet with the wide red steps in front and the porch where we children played.  Though much has changed outside, it is the same old house inside where we once spent many of our days.  The main occupants, my old maid aunts, were very strict about the cleanliness and upkeep of the place.  The floor always shiny, the shelves and figurines always dustless.  When I was a child I did my share of the work and it was from my grandmother that I learned many practical things.

I won't ever forget when I was four and I played with my aunts' red nail polish, applied it to my nails then removed the same with acetone using a white embroidered hanky.  I then hid the stained hanky under the bed cover.  I was discovered but nobody got mad, after all I was only four.  I won't forget too when as a grade schooler, both aunts and my uncle would make me recite poetry after dinner when they relaxed in the living room.  The Christmases and the New Year's Eve and Day celebrations, the barbeques on my school supervisor aunt's birthdays, the pre-cemented yard's short grass in clear water when it rains, the frogs kokak-kokak-ing, the many snails climbing up the adobe fence,  the green swing which would have still been there had my sibling possessed even an eighth of my sensibilities.

The walls and ceiling of the interior was art in themselves.  The walls which was originally varnished was now painted with a faux woodgrain finish every panel separated by a chain of wooden half-spheres as mouldings.  The ceiling has recessed lighting.  And my treasures the lovely figurines.  The ceramic yellow duck and old fisherman complete with a fishing pole with a ceramic fish at the end, they are both gone but not from my memory;  the wide eyed puppy which I should have taken already the last time I was there.  The  green prancing horse which actually is a vase which housed waterplants.  There was a Venus statue which was actually a timeteller because from its hand swung a clock.  The clock probably broke but I saved the statue itself.  I don't know what happened to it.

The oval mirror above the old stereo cabinet, the green dragon designed chinese coffee set, the now antique chocolate 'batidor' and the ceramic mixing bowl, the small heavy palanggana, the antique aparador with the childhood pictures of my lola, my mother and her siblings pasted on the inside of its door,  the old bookcase with the old books, hardcover novelas, the book of trivia, of life in the probinsiya .. this was my first library.  Rebecca, Dragonwyck .. the pages now worn and loose.  

It pains me that these contents will simply be thrown in a bodega carelessly, that the house which was loved and cared for by those who have passed and by their loyal caregiver will simply be turned over to some uncaring souls.   The meek will inherit the earth, is what religion supposedly preaches.  More apt, to me, is 'The stupid inherits the earth.' 'The greedy inherits the earth.'