TAAL

And in Taal, the house of Cuasay breathes on, but it carries the perilous weight of old age and disrepair, and perhaps, like us, sometimes aches for company. The former kitchen wing of the house had collapsed and had been totally done away with. The massive staircase to the porch that annouced the rest of the house now creaks and looks puny. The garden that the stairway and porch preside over in a graceful ascent does not now appear that it is in bloom. The once proud house is tired, faded and unadorned, having survived Mamang Uroy and Nanang Ilang, and all their sons and daughters. Yet, even in the absence of the once robust family that used to dwell within its walls, the house is a treasure chest of more than memories and a few lives.

We are again boys and girls in that house, our vacation time camping ground. We recite poetry, sing our old songs, compare our school grades, our precious pimples and many love letters. We sing in the street below, bask in the moonlight, or hunched in chairs arranged in large semi-circles, we play juego de prenda into early dawn. We shred melons, float them in crushed ice and milk and eat the mixture like ambrosia. We trade stories about all the girls we thought we loved while our girl cousins gossip about their boyfriends. The wind is always there, the sky studded with stars, and always, the passion of our lives was to share, like there were no ordinary moments.

These are the memories that bound us to each other, until one day, like our elders who packed their belongings and left to search for their own truth, we also went our separate ways to seek wisdom and speak our own voices. Yet to this day, these memories bind us together still. Without our elders, we still sit in council, although now, mostly from afar, to help tear down our broken walls that we may expand our boundaries and build on, that we may share our experiences and pains knowing now that there are ordinary moments after all.

As long as one of us lives who remembers the old house, our elders and parts of their legacy, as long as their images are kept alive by our children to whom we bequeath our passion to share, as long as one of them sings the songs of our growing years that draw forth the promises of virtue and worthiness like a rose of countless petals that exude fragrance and abundance, the house of Cuasay may totter, break and ultimately fall, but on its small hill, where even now, still it stands with effort but without any help, where even now, still it embraces a spectacular piece of God's sky, the mountains and the sea as they meet in the far off horizon, the house of Cuasay endures, and like Taal, cannot die. In other places and cities, indeed, in other parts of the globe where we wander and find our center, where we wed and bear our children, we are building other houses, and in our hearts, we are calling them Taal.