By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

SHE was thinking, “Is this all?” I know because she told me that on our way to Bolinao to attend a rally we helped organize. This she asked, as we passed through yellow green fields and the soft rising sun on our skin. There were pink clusters of kakawati flowers on the way, exotic wild vines, the wavy pattern of the hills, the thick cluster of trees that seem to have made itself invisible to the eyes of loggers. She did not look at them. Not exactly, she looked, but she did not see them. She saw the nothingness, in the silence that pervaded her being.

Mildred was not always like that. She used to tell me, while driving up to Puso ng Carmelo, that the pods of the kakawati curl and explode when they are dry, imitating the sound of a popcorn on a frying pan. It would be amazing, she said, if we chanced upon a cluster of kakawatis with their dry pods crackling and popping at the same time. “Imagine the sound of that”, she exclaimed, “a concert of tree sounds, conducted by the wind!”

Tessie would have joined the concert, because her voice cracked and crackled too, and would have delighted the nymphs and the fairies in the forest. She never sang anywhere except in the car, and I only heard her sing once, a song her mother taught her when she was young, about the kakawati. I did not interrupt her singing with an exclamation of surprise, afraid that she will be self-conscious and will not continue singing. When she finished, I told her, “You should sing more often”, and she laughed. “No”, she said, “I sang only because I missed my mother.”

The kakawati is known by many names. To others, it is madre cacao. It is very common in the Philippines, flowering in the months of February and March. Some compare it to the cherry blossoms of Japan for its pink cluster of flowers. When I was a child, I would string it into a necklace or a crown and put it on my head. I would cut a sprig and put it on a vase, and I would stare at it and imagine dwarves and elves and tiny flying fairies, the size of fireflies.

As far back as I can remember, the kakawati had always been a part of my life. When I started raising orchids as a hobby, I used its trunk as a driftwood to mount the orchid seedlings there. When the hobby became a source of income, I was visited by all kinds of people, collectors of rare orchids, and manufacturers of garden supplies. It was during this time that a man from Isabela arrived with a truckload of driftwood from kakawati trees, offering me half the price of what I bought in the garden stores. From the looks of it, he had felled at least two mature trees.

“Ma’am, I have a farm of kakawati trees, I can supply you regularly.”

“How big is your farm?”

“It is big, Ma’am, it could be bigger. I do not own the land. I asked the owners of the vacant lots if I could plant in them. The kakawati is easy to grow. I plant the branches I am not able to sell. I have planted since I was a teenager.”

I wonder what has become of Mang Kardo. Or what happened to his expanding farm of kakawati trees. I wonder if, like Mildred, he would have asked me, “Is this all?” or like Tessie, could have sang too, the song of the kakawati.  Or did he finally buy a portion of the land where he planted his trees?

Is this all? I wish I could show Mildred, it is not. The moon is out there, mysterious and mystical, it makes me sing, by its very presence, and it sings to me, like a beloved. I wish too, I could tell Mang Kardo that he could make himself a garden, and share his heart with the full moon.

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