Sangilo

By Virginia Pasalo

 

MY mother told me that less than a month after I was born, I was taken to Sangilo, a mining community in Itogon Benguet. My childhood was spent in this place of wild sunflowers and sweet fruits from vines and trees, and root crops. For twelve years, I scaled its mountains, explored its forests, and viewed the China Sea, with childhood friends, Alma Agustin, Pedro Salcedo, Yolanda Salcedo, and some others whose names I have forgotten.

The smell of newly-baked bread flirts on my nose every morning and refreshes my memory of Ayik, the baker of U-Need Store, who would throw hot buns to children playing on the slopes of the hill. Not a bun reaches the ground, the children were good at catching them, the way they made a homerun in baseball. Further down the road going to the hospital is the Bahay Saleng (Pine Tree House), where I am welcomed by the warmest smile of a Japanese baker, Mr. Jagonase. My life is full of bakers and their bread and their smiles that it is almost impossible to greet the mornings without joy.

In the little space where I planted unas (sugarcane), cosmos, gumamela (hibiscus) and an assortment of wildflowers, I remember finding chicken bones planted in a row, with my sister Lydia watering them each morning, hoping they will grow into chicken. I would have wanted to plant sunflowers, but they were already all over the mountain slopes, and I inhaled the peculiar smell of its stalks as we rubbed them on wooden floors to make them shine.

My memory takes me back to Pasalo Studio, back when pictures were taken by professional photographers in a room, and those who were being photographed “posed” for the cameraman, and not take a “selfie”. Looking up from the studio, my eyes would catch a boy’s stare, and I would stare back, from the crocheted curtains, with my heart rhythmically pounding, like the rhythms in the making of deremen in the moonlight, in my grandparents’ home in San Jacinto.

So many memories, some forgotten, some refreshed by the smell of bread, the deep colors of cosmos, an unexpected encounter with the past, or a fruit. Some fruits I have eaten, forbidden, by those who planted them.

 

PEELING PERSIMMONS

Listening to silence, sipping coffee,

peeling persimmons and you,

a stranger to the dance and the music

in my mind

 

a drop of rain on my body and soul

turning everything fresh and green,

speaking in the silence

and the spaces between words,

drinking tea, and biting on fresh dates,

maybe.

 

Maybe. Because, i don’t really know you
maybe i made you up,

in that warm and humid part of me
where fireflies crawl on blades of grass,

and fly on branches of trees

that dance at  midnight,

when the waterfalls caress

the forest

 

for a brief moment,

i smell the light of distant stars,

and ride on moonbeams to fly beyond,

without eating anything, drinking anything

but the thought of peeling, ripened persimmons.

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