Smelling home

By Jahwella Ocay

It was another Christmas break, and I had this one thing in mind which I really wanted to do – to hang around in our municipality’s well-improved plaza. It wasn’t about simply killing time or plain gallivanting.  It was a search for something, something to grasp on that would make feel at home once more.

Since the day I started studying in Baguio, I rarely had the chance to just hang out in my hometown’s plaza. I go home during weekends, but I only get to see it before I take a tricycle to our house when I happen to arrive late at night, or when I wait for a bus heading back to Baguio on a usual Tuesday morning; but never an opportunity to really go inside and just sit on one of its benches.

And this break, I finally had the chance. And I even did it with my former classmates and friends in high school. Last week, a day after Christmas, I settled there the whole afternoon with my other high school classmates. We really did not do anything, just a sharing of stories, of the experiences we had after we graduated from high school, of jokes and a chance to play.

My friends may not have noticed it, but there was actually something else going on inside me which gave meaning to that certain time and moment I was sharing and having with them. Our municipal plaza has, indeed, changed. It has new benches, lights, sheds, a playground with seesaws and swings, a beautiful water fountain, tiled floors, and more flowering plants – really different from how it looked like four years ago. But just sitting there felt and smelled like home.

When I went to college, Baguio became a new home for me. Over the last four years of staying there, I have already visited its parks, sat on its parks’ benches to oftentimes watch its world go by with ordinary but unknown faces. The parks there are beautiful too, and maybe more beautiful than Mangaldan’s plaza because Baguio’s cool weather allows for more varied blooms. But somehow, those parks are really different and somehow strange. I couldn’t smell familiarity on their plants and trees, on their benches or on their playgrounds.

I remember what a friend once told me: “No matter how far and long you wander, if you know your way back home, you will never get lost.”

I can’t exactly put it into words, but I guess it was this feeling of finally being home and seeing myself once more in a place I very well know. And I guess it wasn’t really about the plaza but of what it made me feel – belongingness and familiarity. It felt so good enjoying a familiar “Mangaldan scent”. I can do the same things in other parks in other places, but the feeling would be different. What I just did with my friends that day was beyond mere hanging out and visiting.

It was going back to see and feel at home once again.

(Readers may reach columnist at marifijara@gmail.com. For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/roots/
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